"Nurturing the youth of today, Lighting the pathways for the leaders of tomorrow"
PROGRAMS
Titus Foundation Mini Grant Programs
The Titus Foundation is pleased that we were able to offer four mini grants in our first year of operation.
As we continue to grow so will our grant program grow. It is our intent to support small grass roots programs that have real impact on youth development.
The Awardees:
G’s to Gents helps empower young men and fosters personal growth. It is a day of workshops on proper professional dress and etiquette, resume writing, and interviewing skills
https://voicesofliberation.org/
We were able to provide support fo
r their first and successful fundraising basketball tournament on the Fens summer of 2022.
The project works with people facing addiction, homelessness, and mental health issues.
A educational program that uses basketball to motivate young people to achieve in school and life.
The program works with students families and schools to provide surround care for student development. No Books No Ball has become an integral part of the fabric of Boston’s black community.
The focus of the Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute is to increase the skills, knowledge and ability of individuals who wish to engage in creating lasting, positive change in their communities. The Institute is designed to work with people at varying levels of awareness ranging from awakening to people who are knowledgeable, organized and engaged. Awakening involves helping individuals, who have never been or who are newly engaged in social change activities, gain an understanding of why social change may be necessary in their community and how to participate in creating it. As the course progresses, people develop the skills and strategies needed to transform their communities into places that reflect neighborhood residents’ concept of how an engaged community functions and what it looks and feels like.
Paula Titus Scholarship Fund
The purpose of the Fund will be to provide scholarship support to one or more full time undergraduate students in the Sport Leadership and Administration Program. Recipients must have financial need, as determined by Financial Aid. Recipients must have graduated from Boston Public High Schools or a public high school in a Massachusetts Gateway City, as defined by the Massachusetts State Legislature in Section 3A of Chapter 23A of the General Laws of Massachusetts as: Attleboro, Barnstable, Brockton, Chelsea, Chicopee, Everett, Fall River, Fitchburg, Haverhill, Holyoke, Lawrence, Leominster, Lowell, Lynn, Malden, Methuen, New Bedford, Peabody, Pittsfield, Quincy, Revere, Salem, Springfield, Taunton, Westfield, and Worcester. Students who have completed pre-freshman programs including, but not limited to The Base, Peter Gammons Scholars, Urban Scholars, Directions for Student potential, and Upward Bound will be given preferred consideration. Eligible students must have a GPA of 3.0 or higher at the time of the award and be an active participant in co-curricular activities within the sport leadership and administration field.
Paula Titus Golf Outing
The Paula Titus Golf Outing is the first initiative of the Titus Foundation now in the third year. It is held in honor of the late matriarch of the Titus family. Paula was a fierce believer in supporting young people in all ways available. She was a confidant, a provider of meals, an advocate, and a mother figure for decades of students at University of Massachusetts Boston. The foundation has made a minimum five-year commitment to the golf outing with the goal of raising more than $500,000 for the endowed Paula Titus Scholarship Fund to support students enrolled in the New Balance Sports Leadership and Administration Program at University of Massachusetts Boston. This endowed fund will support hundreds of students for many, many years to come.
The 2024 Outing will be held at the George Divine Golf Club at Franklin Park in Dorchester MA on Monday, June 3, 2024. Registration is open.
YES Africa
YES (Youth Education and Sports) with Africa is an innovative partnership that seeks to develop the athletic prowess of young people while expanding their educational and cultural horizons. The program gave youngsters aged 7 to 19 the opportunity to acquire basketball skills while learning about computers and other technology, health issues, and their own cultural heritage. UMass Boston’s role began at the discussion level in 1999 and quickly grew.
During the summer of 2000 Charlie Titus, athletic director at UMass Boston, joined the program as a coach, lecturer, instructor, and consultant. Then Professor Jemadari Kamara, director of the Center for African Caribbean and Community Development at UMass Boston, came aboard. Both men believed strongly that the program could serve as an ambassador of the sport of basketball and of U.S. culture in general. And they believed that capacity building—the expansion of athletic, technical, educational, and entrepreneurial activities— should be an essential part of the mission.
Yes with Africa experienced enormous success, owing largely to its focus on quality and to a high degree of cooperation among its sponsors. The program enjoyed the backing of government agencies like the Ministry of Youth and National Solidarity of Niger, corporations like Coca-Cola and Air Afrique, and local organizations like the Basketball Federation of Niger.
Yes with Africa was soon adopted in other localities—during the summer of 2002, Senegal and Benin hosted Yes with Africa camps for the first time—and interest continued to grow, far outstripping capacity.
In December 2006, Vice Chancellor Titus gave a presentation to the new President of Benin, President Yayi Boni, (a young man considered to embody the new breed of African leadership) and his staff in Washington DC. The presentation was about the YES with Africa project in Contonou, Benin. This exemplified the interest the program has attracted. Several African heads of state have told the organizers they would like to host the program if funding could be found.
The program has enjoyed broad support from governmental and private groups in Africa and has the enthusiastic endorsement of the administration and faculty at UMass Boston. In 2008 the University of Massachusetts Boston received a grant from the U.S. Department of State to support a two-year coaches’ exchange program based in Senegal.
For this program, a contingent of six Senegalese visited UMass Boston in Winter 2009, and five UMass Boston representatives traveled to Senegal in Summer 2009. In 2016 new UMass Boston head men’s basketball coach Jason Harris made his first trip Africa. He continued to help develop young boys and girls through the game of basketball.
There is a strong network of contacts involved with the YES program. In Senegal, for example, YES with Africa is currently active in Dakar, St. Louis, Mbour, Goree and Thies. We have involved over 30 coaches in Senegal. YES with Africa also operates at a similar scale in Benin. The YES with Africa program presently focuses on youth ages 8-18 and has five dimensions, all integrated to form a unified project:
- Cultural arts sharing, building pride in creativity and heritage, and teaching strategies to sustain traditions and support performances and exhibitions
- Health education seminars, including HIV/AIDS awareness
- Applied technological skills, focused on computers and the Internet
- Basketball coaches training and youth technique development
- Environmental awareness, including recycling and conservation
The basic strategy of YES is that African boys and girls agree to take classes on the above topics in the morning in exchange for the reward of playing sports and improving their sports skills in the afternoon. This is a model that has been used successfully by many organizations in the U.S. (Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs, for example) in addition to Africa. YES is a multiethnic, coeducational, sports and leadership development experience. It affords young people the opportunity to develop social and critical thinking skills, meet diverse youth from a variety of cultural, economic, and ethnic groups, expand personal horizons and enjoy physical training. Fostering youth and trainer exchanges is an important objective of the project.
