Partnerships – Shirts Across America

Thank you for your interest in partnering with Shirts Across America! Students and adults who travel with us return feeling inspired, empowered, and connected. However, it does not stop there. Keep reading to see how our trips even impact the people who don’t travel with us to New Orleans and learn how you can explore a partnership with Shirts Across America.

Student Benefits

Team Work: On the trips, students work with peers from all grades, genders, and social groups, giving them a unique opportunity to grow their collaboration and interpersonal skills. This helps students forge strong bonds with their peers as they come together for a greater purpose.

Diverse Culture: Students encounter economic, racial, and class disparity as well as differing cultures. Many students appreciate the eye opening opportunity and grow tremendously from the experience.

New Skills: While in New Orleans participants are given the opportunity to learn a wide range of construction skills including flooring, painting, or dry wall hanging. Leading up to the trips, students also learn how to effectively fundraise and educate about the persisting problems in New Orleans. This empowers and motivates the students to become more involved in service within their community.

Local Engagement: Students come back from the trip inspired to affect their local communities in a positive way. Through the skills they learned from SAA, participants can be even more impactful with their efforts.

School Benefits

Strengthened School Spirit: The trip offers a unique experience through which many students learn not only about the world outside of their community, but also themselves. Classmates who experience this together form a strong bond, a relationship that lasts longer than the week spent in New Orleans.

Strong Connection Between Students and Staff: School faculty who come on the trips will be paired with a group of participants, allowing them to work closely with students from their own school throughout the week. Working together in a setting outside of school allows for a more organic bond to form, through which the students can learn much more from the teachers than the subjects they learn in the classroom.

Empowered Student Body: SAA trips empower students to celebrate their accomplishments, challenging them to practice more ambitious goal setting and driving them to accomplishing things initially outside of their comfort levels.

Impact on Local and Non-Local Communities: Upon returning from New Orleans students and adults alike feel inspired to continue the important work they started. Students get to tell their peers about their own life changing experiences in New Orleans, inspiring those who didn’t even come on the trips to act to better the lives of others.

Community Benefits

Strengthened Community: On the trip students will experience the close-knit community of New Orleans. Students will often comment on the love they feel from everyone despite being strangers, and how they want to make their own communities at home more like it.

Engaged Youth: Students transform into empowered and engaged youth after seeing what they can accomplish on the trip, returning home driven to impact their communities in a positive way. Inspired by a revitalized passion for service, students spend more time engaging with their local communities, creating further change for the better.

Meaningful Impact: The volunteers who go to NOLA not only represent their school, they also represent their community. They demonstrate that the community cares while also making a meaningful impact on New Orleans, an experience that has a significant effect on them in return.

Education About Current Issues: Leading up to the trip, we encourage students to educate their friends and family members about the ongoing needs of New Orleans and how these needs still relate to issues the United States faces today. Through this process, the community becomes more aware of current events as well as the needs of fellow Americans.