{"id":3036,"date":"2014-12-22T16:57:22","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T21:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=3036"},"modified":"2015-05-16T21:39:57","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T01:39:57","slug":"thread-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2014\/12\/thread-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Thread of Opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thread<\/a>As a biomedical doctoral student, Sarah Hemminger \u201902, PhD \u201910, had driven past the intersection of Caroline and Orleans streets hundreds of times on her way to Johns Hopkins\u2019 East Baltimore medical campus. But while she was idling at a traffic light one early weekday morning in 2004, the surrounding scene suddenly flipped into new focus.<\/p>\n

She saw not just a group of students milling around outside Dunbar High School, but an opportunity to reach out and connect with people in her community in a way that would be deeply meaningful for her and for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew that many of those young people faced the same issues that my husband, Ryan, encountered in high school in Indianapolis: poverty and a lack of a safety net of any kind,\u201d Hemminger says. \u201cHe was floundering until an absolutely amazing group of teachers came through for him, supporting him with rides to school, tutoring, food, and all the other things that he needed to be successful. I also realized that those students and I had something in common: We all were, in some way, isolated. I thought that if we could reach out to those students, both they and I would benefit from the sense\u00a0of connection, and wonderful things could happen for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little more than a decade later, Hemminger is CEO and founder of Thread, a nonprofit that has become a nationally recognized model for helping underperforming high school students achieve their potential academically and socially. Thread (originally called the Incentive Mentoring Program) does this by wrapping the students in a strong, new social fabric woven from university- and community-based volunteers, who \u201cdo whatever it\u00a0takes to help them be successful,\u201d according to Hemminger.<\/p>\n