OUR MISSION

NUTELLS is committed to promoting social justice in our community by simultaneously creating opportunities for campus employees to learn English and for Northeastern students to become engaged in their community and form real, personal relationships with people outside of the student population. 

From Grammar to Empowerment

We serve a diverse population of workers, whose native languages include Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and whose English skills are often extremely low or nonexistent. This can be hugely limiting for many people, in several aspects. The first, and most obvious aspect, is the simple fact of practicality and communication on the job--many of the students and customers they serve are English-speaking, as well as many of their managers. In addition, employees who are able to speak English are able to better communicate in order to represent themselves and their rights, and thus create a safer and healthier workplace environment for themselves and others. By providing the opportunity for them to learn or improve their English, we help them to more effectively communicate with the people around them, both in their current jobs and in future jobs, for which they will be able to make themselves more desirable candidates. 

Community Engagement

In addition to our goal of creating learning opportunities for workers, an important part of our mission is the relationships we establish between Northeastern students and Northeastern campus employees. All too often--and not just on our campus--there is a social divide between these two groups that, in reality, coexist every single day, occupying the same space and engaging in the same interactions. Because tutors teach the same students for an entire semester, meeting once a week for four months, they truly are able to develop a personal relationship and begin to see each other as people, rather than simply cast each other in those social categories that we so easily play into. By creating this dialogue and facilitating these interactions, we create opportunity for Northeastern students to take a second look at their own perspective of their community: to see more than just a college campus in the larger setting of a "college town," and to begin to see Boston as a real, diverse community made up of many different types of people from all walks of life.

Progress

In the past year, NUTELLS has seen its tutor and worker populations skyrocket. We have already gone from having only a couple classes per week to having twelve! This is enormous growth, and is a clear sign that this educational resource is something that is desperately needed in our community, and that Northeastern students are able and excited to be a part of it. We achieved this growth through extending our advertising efforts to the student population and through extending our outreach efforts to the employee population. We found that students were indeed looking for an opportunity like this to give back to their community, and were even able to form a partnership with the Service Learning Center to extend the opportunity to those students. In addition, we reached out to the janitor population on campus, and by simply going to talk to them before their shifts, were able to get many of them involved in our classes. 

We are now reaching more workers and involving more students than ever, but this is only the beginning! Our goals for the future include recruiting even more workers and students, offering different types of classes (i.e. computer classes), and of course always updating and innovating our curriculum materials to make each class as effective as possible.