Power in Partnership: U.S. Dream Academy

In this Q&A, U.S. Dream Angel Academy’s Naaila Gray, National Mentor Program Director, and Dipen Bhakta, Co-Area Director, Texas, explain how they’ve partnered with Unite Us to streamline access to critical resources, improve community support, and enhance holistic care for the students they serve.

Our Power in Partnership series highlights our national and regional partners and the work they do with Unite Us to build healthier communities.

Tell us more about your organization.

The U.S. Dream Academy is dedicated to inspiring and uplifting children of incarcerated parents and families living in communities impacted by systemic inequities. Our mission is to ensure that every child, regardless of the challenges they face or the environment they grow up in, has the opportunity to pursue their own unique dreams.

What are the greatest needs of the individuals and families you serve?

The needs of the children and families we support are vast and interconnected. Key areas of focus include:

• Academic assistance and enrichment to help students succeed in underserved communities
• Mentoring and fostering positive adult relationships to provide guidance and stability
• Social-emotional learning and healing-centered engagement to support emotional and psychological well-being
• Career exploration and skill development to prepare youth for future success
• Family engagement and support to strengthen the entire household
• Community development and empowerment in historically underserved neighborhoods
• Mental health support and awareness to address the growing need for accessible mental health services

What are the main programs or offerings that your organization provides? How have these expanded over time?

The U.S. Dream Academy offers an innovative afterschool and mentoring program that currently operates in multiple cities across the country. Our research-based programs are designed to engage young people in active learning and personal development.

• Mentoring: Fostering consistent, supportive relationships between students and positive adult role models
• Tutoring: Providing academic support to close learning gaps and foster achievement
• Hands-on STEM activities: Promoting critical thinking and creativity through science, technology, engineering, and math
• Field trips and cloud-based literacy support: Facilitating enriching experiences and personalized literacy development

Our mentoring program has expanded to serve youth beyond our in-person programming. Through our secure online platform, young people can now connect online with mentors from anywhere. One U.S. Dream Academy mentor says, “Mentoring has allowed me to see the importance of developing a relationship with children. I’ve come to see the significance of letting a kid be a kid while helping them in the classroom, learning alongside them, and hearing their voices. Seeing a child gain confidence and strength in who they are has helped me to be a better person and citizen of my communities.”

What led you to partner with Unite Us?

We partnered with Unite Us to strengthen our ability to connect families to vital services. By using the Unite Us platform in our resources, we can make our referral process easier and connect families to services like housing, jobs, and benefits navigation more quickly. Families often have similar needs in these areas. Through this partnership, we’re not only connecting families to services but also reaching young people who have expressed interest in virtual mentoring. This seamless, integrated approach complements our holistic model of support for students and families.

Unite Us is helping us increase our reach to impact more young people with mentoring. Through Unite Us, we are able to offer virtual mentoring to young people that are not located in our 7 flagship cities where we provide in-person programming.  In addition, Unite Us provides the opportunity for us to identify additional partners in the mentoring space.” – Naaila Gray, National Mentor Program Director

How does collaborating with other organizations play a role in your work?

Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do at U.S. Dream Academy. We’ve built strong partnerships with local schools, community organizations, government offices, and other service providers across the country, allowing us to offer a broad range of services to the youth and families we serve.

For instance, we work closely with local schools in each of our priority cities to provide after-school programming, ensuring that our support extends beyond regular school hours. In Houston, we partner with Collective Action for Youth to address systemic inequities, focusing on preventive strategies tied to the criminal justice system. Partnerships like these help us tackle complex issues and deliver a more comprehensive, tailored approach to support.

By leveraging the expertise and resources of other organizations, we can significantly expand our impact and more effectively address the diverse needs of our communities.

What’s something you’re excited about in terms of future projects and/or initiatives at your organization?

We’re especially excited about the Scott Street Youth Institute (SSYI) in Texas and its accompanying initiatives, including the Youth Leadership Cohort, which empowers young leaders to investigate, collaborate, and advocate for their communities. SSYI aims to create more equitable and non-violent neighborhoods by nurturing middle and high school students to become critical thinkers and engaged citizens. Their youth-centered model fosters a collaborative social climate where both adults and youth work together on community-organizing projects that build the assets of schools and neighborhoods.

We’re also looking forward to seeing the impact of projects like the Inner Circle Film Project, which fosters healing circles in our focus neighborhoods, and our Teen Mental Health Campaign, which aims to raise awareness about the challenges young people are facing today. 

Another exciting initiative is the expansion of our Exposure Lab program, which provides career exploration opportunities for middle school students in five core career fields. These initiatives are closely aligned with our mission to inspire and invest in children’s lives, particularly in communities impacted by systemic inequities.  We believe these efforts will drive meaningful, positive change in the community.

By creating opportunities for youth to reflect on their personal growth and their impact on others, the U.S. Dream Academy continues to build a generation of young leaders who uplift and inspire those around them.