Breaking News – EFC Founder & Director, Ashanti Branch named Stanford d.school Fellow

We are thrilled to announce that The Ever Forward Club founder Ashanti Branch will join ten new d.school fellows for 2015-16 who will deepen their abilities to help people learn, teach and apply design thinking in the world.
What is a Project Fellow at the d.school at Stanford?  Project fellows are early- to mid-career professionals who are growing creative organizations to accelerate systems-level impact in their areas of expertise. This academic year, we welcome seven project fellows focused on one of two areas, K12 education and civic innovation. The d.school project fellows are Ashanti Branch, Will Byrne, Patrick Cook-Deegan, Lauren Hancock, Rita Nguyen, Chris Rudd and Jill Vialet.
A Note from Ever Forward Club Founding Executive Director Ashanti Branch:
I am so honored to be selected as a 2015-2016 Fellows for the d.school at Stanford School of Design. During this fellowship, I will have the opportunity to work alongside 7 project fellows who are working to build their own organizations and whose experience and leadership is going to teach me so much during this year. I have begin to learn the elements of design thinking so that I may apply it to The Ever Forward Club as we prepare to build and scale to serve thousands more youth in the Bay Area and beyond.
This summer, when I cleaned out my office at Montera Middle School and began to sort through stacks of books, reports and notes that I have read, written and/or been given over the past 13 years of this journey in education; 11 of those as the director of The Ever Forward Club, which I started in 2004, I find it impossible not to reflect. When I shifted from building great structures as an engineer to building great tools to help young math thinkers in 2002, I knew that I was going to have to do something more to reach those students who were not passing my classes, but whom I felt a deep connection with. I knew that being a qualified, big-hearted, culturally competent, well intentioned and highly educated teacher was only the prerequisites to get in the door of the teaching profession but it was not enough to capture the attention of those students who I was desperately trying to reach. That was how The Ever Forward Club was born.
The Ever Forward Club has demonstrated some incredible success over the past 11 years and even more over the past 3 years as I have been visioning EFC as an organization and not merely a program. The most exciting acknowledgement of our work has been being featured in The Mask You Live In, a documentary by The Representation Project, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.
Stay Tuned as we will serve even more young men than ever before through our ‘Taking off the Mask’ workshops and The Ever Forward Clubs.
Ever Forward,
Ashanti Branch
To partner with The Ever Forward Club during this exciting year, you can  DONATE HERE
The Ever Forward Club
http://www.everforwardclub.org/