Carey MBA Student Gives Lacrosse Sticks and Scholarships to Underprivileged Kids

Jake Klein, a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Flexible MBA student, co-founded a nonprofit, Harlem Lacrosse, that is being featured in a new national advertising campaign by Dick’s Sporting Goods. This news comes according to a press release on the school’s webpage.

Harlem Lacrosse aims to improve academic achievement of inner-city students in Harlem and in Baltimore under the auspices of the school’s lacrosse team, which the nonprofit creates, funds, and runs. Since launching in 2011, the program has has helped earn $9 million in scholarship offers for its participants.

In an article on the Carey School website, Klein says that the hidden secret to the success of Harlem Lacrosse is that the nonprofit is not actually about lacrosse.

“The big secret is that all the gains were entirely educational,” Klein said. “On average, the special education kids had nearly 10 point GPA increases, and some of the other kids had five to six points in their core classes. The gains in the state test scores for the students in our program were some of the highest in the entire city. It was all of those kind of stats that the adults were in on, but as far as the kids knew, they were just playing on their school lacrosse team.”

What’s next for Klein and Harlem Lacrosse?

“Beyond lacrosse being a hotbed here, the problems we were seeing in Harlem and the South Bronx were just Baltimore light,” Klein said. “We really feel like there are oceans of kids like this who are full of potential but just need the door opened and they just need the resources and information.”

You can check out the ad that will be running below:

regions: Baltimore

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