On Wednesday, Mayor Jim Thornton bestowed a check to a local organization that aims to help underprivileged youth.

The LaGrange City Council had previously agreed to provide funding for Adaptive Growth and Cultural Advancement Organization. The group organizes a nonprofit afterschool program that regularly hosts education and mentoring events at the William Griggs Recreation Center.

“The city council is always looking for ways to help the youth in the community, and Adaptive Growth has a great mentoring program that is really trying to reach at risk kids in our community,” Thornton said.

“This is the second year in a row that the city council has felt like this is a good investment for the council to make.”

Funding from the city plays a critical role in keeping the program going, but organizers also feel that it makes a statement of support that is just as important.

“It has a very positive affect because it not only lets the community know that you have a city who cares about the needs of the community, but that they are not just putting the words up front, they are putting their dollars behind it,” Leon Childs said.

“It is one thing for a lot of people to say what they are going to do, but when you actually put action behind it, that says a lot for me.”

Childs models parts of the program after the popular Kumon program which emphasizes doing a little bit of work on a subject every day, but Adaptive Growth deviates from Kumon in its focus on at risk youth and the inclusion of the mentoring program.

“Education and your child’s future, that is an investment,” Childs said. “You have to get the kids the tools that they need in order to be successful.”

Representatives from the city have visited the recreation center to see the program in action and seeing its success so far has only encouraged more confidence in the program’s future and a desire to see it grow.

“I have personally attended some of their mentoring workshops at the recreation center, and it is impressive what they do,” Thornton said. “They have a really good group of mentors, a great group of kids, like many organizations they have more kids then mentors, and so I hope that more people in the community will consider volunteering for this and other programs.”

To learn more about Adaptive Growth, visit them on Facebook.