Going the Distance with Growing the Distance
When learning meets fun, that's where the magic happens. What makes Growing the Distance an exceptional summer camp and after-school center is the dynamic duo of Aniya Mayo and Sherena Sabla. Their collective vision of academic and character growth through play means that their students leave Growing the Distance each day with a brighter future than the day before.
Before the duo was teaching the children of High Point how to playfully embrace new and unique opportunities for growth, they were working together in children's education. In the summer, while working at education-based summer camps, both Aniya and Sherena found the children in their respective programs to be disengaged. Picking up a pencil to do worksheets wasn’t anyone’s idea of summer fun. So, when they realized that these children were missing out on learning, Sherena told Aniya, “Bring your notebook tomorrow. We've got some planning to do.”
Their childcare program was born out of that mutual epiphany that the gaps in elementary education are often due to a lack of opportunities for exploration and fun in education. That’s why when planning their summer camp, Sherena and Aniya made sure each day would bring a new lesson that was as exciting as it was educational. In addition to traditional academics, Sherena and Aniya wanted Growing the Distance to be a place where their children could learn real world life skills like cooking, financial literacy, and wellness.
In the year 2019, the duo launched the first summer session for Growing the Distance. Their summer camp program reflected just how ready the two were to tap into the minds of the kids around them.
Happy campers meant happy parents, who saw their children engaged and learning. So, naturally, the pleased parents were wondering about after school care for when the summer camp ended. When Aniya and Sherena were asked about year-round daycare, the pair realized how valuable their program was to the community, and returned to their notebooks to write up new plans for a year round childcare program.
Their nonprofit aims to be an academic resource for the youth of High Point, so they designed around filling in the educational gaps through scholarship and service. Growing the Distance funds scholarships to their program as well as facilitates fall festivals for the community, and food giveaways to support the families that support their learning environment. When Sherena and Aniya planned for their program, they put the children’s growth at the very heart.
A day at Growing the Distance begins and ends with character development. Part of what makes Aniya and Sherena’s program so unique is the accountability they impress on their students. While every day is designed to be a brand new adventure, the duo emphasizes that each child has the potential to be kind, to be respectful, and to reach outside of their comfort zone and grow. At the start of the week, the children’s morning circle allows them to get in the headspace of taking each new opportunity as a chance to love something new. The mindset of “I don’t like sports” can turn into “I don’t like solo sports, but I really love playing on a team” so quickly, and Aniya and Sherena’s mission is to remind the kids not to shut out their possibilities and to learn more about themselves through open-mindedness.
With their broad range of teaching plans from mock trials and math scavenger hunts to cooking class and yoga lessons, you might wonder how a dynamic duo and their staff facilitate so many different avenues for learning. If it takes a village, Aniya and Sherena are the ones calling town meetings. A big aspect of their own successful program is turning to the expertise of friends and community members to better the lives of the children.
“We get people who are good at what we do,” Aniya explains. “We can’t do everything. I don’t know anything about science. But we know someone who does, or at least someone who knows someone else who does.”
These guest-led lessons facilitate new life skills that children don’t always have time to learn, but sometimes all it takes is to try a new skill to find a new passion. The goal of Growing the Distance is for each child to have the chance to gain confidence in their abilities.
“Last year we had someone in to teach the kids how to cook. They made an omelet one day, and then maybe two weeks later we got an email on a Saturday morning. It said ‘look at the omelet my kid made. She said she learned how to make it at Growing the Distance.’”Aniya recalls with a smile. “And it was a pretty omelet!”
When Sherena and Aniya planned out their programs, they knew that they had to make learning feel more accessible and fun, but they also thought about what kinds of lessons they wished they had in school.
“What did we need as kids? What were some things that we didn’t learn but we wish we would’ve had growing up?” Sherena says they often ask themselves. “We always try to put elements into the program that would make their experiences easier when they get older.”
Grounding academic learning in real world scenarios makes the process of learning less abstract, which lots of children in purely academic settings struggle with. Embracing learning can be hard when the fractions on math homework feel so distant from your real everyday life. Anyia and Sherena integrate the math skills into real life through the integrative lessons they share, like cooking.
“If we’re baking half the cookies, we need half the amount of all the ingredients,” Aniya gives as an example.
Growing the Distance is about supplementing the children's education, and helping students take individualized approaches to their homework or other academic skills that they struggle with, but at its heart, Growing the Distance is meant to create an easier environment at school for the children and for their teachers.
“We also believe in supporting the schools,“ Aniya says. “We do teacher appreciation hot cocoa bars or stock the staff workroom with snacks because we want to support the teachers who support our kids.”
Beyond school-centric skills like math, their lessons extend far outside of the classroom, and kids at Growing the Distance practice experiential learning through other real-world scenarios such as field trips to the grocery store. Before their outing, Sherena and Aniya play games like “The Price is Right” where they quiz the kids on the prices of household items: detergent, cleaners, food.
“We always try to put elements into the program that would make their experiences easier when they get older.”
Sherena Sabla, Co-Founder and Co-Director at Growing the Distance
“They’ll guess and then they’ll go to the store and see how much things really cost. So it’s learning without feeling like learning,” Aniya says.
These lessons translate to life skills that the children will be able to apply in their day to day lives, or in specialized career paths they would not have encountered in school. Lab science experiments, mock trials, farm field trips, cooking classes, and more are all about supplementing the lessons children get in school with real world practice of their skillset.
As Sherena says, Growing the Distance is about “growing your network of resources to go the distance.”
Discover our High Points,
The HPD Team