For years, Josh Thelemann ’14 had been more than a little concerned about kids growing up in neighborhoods like his—neighborhoods where fewer than 50% of public school students would graduate from high school, 
typical 8th-graders were three levels behind their peers in math and two levels behind in reading, and the housing/income gap is among the highest in the nation. Then it struck him! While studying Elementary Education at Augsburg, he came up with an idea that has now become reality—a nonprofit organization that takes at-risk kids off the streets and provides programs to give them a fair shot. He named it SOS (Saving Our Schools).
In an area where crime rates peak in after-school hours, students and chaperones bike across the city to learn about history, art, science and more. SOS provides programming that aims to decrease suspensions and increase cooperative activity in a school where 99.7% of children live below the poverty line. One annual SOS event, Thanks4Giving Day, is hosted on Black Friday and involves collecting donations for hundreds of families in need, as well as school supplies for schools serving large numbers of at-risk children. Also, SOS is a sponsor of the Minneapolis Math League, providing weekly practices, transportation, and other support for at-risk students to participate.
In launching the nonprofit and finding ways to engage young adults and professionals to help, Thelemann first obtained endorsements for SOS from community leaders, such as then-Mayor R.T. Rybak, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and Senator Terri Bonoff; then partnered with some of the state’s largest education-related organizations. In SOS’s first year, nearly $30,000 in funds, goods, and services was allocated to programming and resources for at-risk students of Minneapolis.
Thelemann, Behavioral Interventionist at Meadowbrook Elementary School in Golden Valley, Minn., is grateful for the amazing support he received from his family and community throughout his youth, as well as for numerous extra-curricular activities, all of which made a difference for him. He acknowledges the “huge role” Augsburg played in his creation of SOS (see www.SaveOurSchoolsToday.org/blog), and is particularly thankful for the “unwavering” support from Dr. Stanley Brown and Prof. Dan Jorgensen, who pushed him to reach new heights and guided him in efforts to foster good will in the community. Thelemann was recently recognized by OTA+Pollen as a “young professional on the rise” and for “outstanding work in the community and personal achievements.”