Northstar Baltimore

Northstar Baltimore is a one-on-one free tutoring and mentoring program for homeless and low-income children in grades K-12 living in Highlandtown/Patterson Park in Baltimore. Our mission is to help these children overcome barriers to personal and academic success. Partnering with families, educators and volunteers, Baltimore Northstar is replicating the DC-based Project Northstar, which has spent 25 years providing weekly tutoring and regular mentoring activities to thousands of D.C.’s most underserved students.

Each Northstar student is teamed up with a volunteer tutor-mentor, who works with the student for the full academic year — and often for many years. When a student starts the program, he or she gets individualized reading and math assessments to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness so the tutor can help the student make fast progress!

Project Northstar was founded in 1989 by a group of leaders from the Washington, D.C. chapters of the Coalition of 100 Black Women and Concerned Black Men and representatives from three local law firms. After twenty successful years as an independent entity, Project Northstar became a program of the Martin Pollak Project, Inc. Since 1989 Project Northstar has served more than 1,500 children in Washington, D.C. by providing weekly tutoring sessions and monthly mentoring activities for some of the city’s most disadvantaged students. In 2016, the D.C.-based Project Northstar was spun off as a separate nonprofit organization while MPP focuses all its energies on Baltimore.