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Dec 30, 2005

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." --Abraham Lincoln

Helping The Children Left Behind

While mentoring and inspiring elementary kids in a low income neighborhood of Roxbury, Massachusetts, Harvard Law student Earl Phalen learned the hard truth about how far behind these kids were academically. Out of his living room he set out to change that by launching BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), a rigorous after-school program that now serves 7,000 kids in four cities. The results, eighty-two percent of the kids in BELL read at grade level or better, despite having started the program typically more than a year behind.