Founders Story

Mitch Zeisler conceived the idea of The UrbanSoph Initiative (TUSI) sometime in 2006, here is his account:

1. It was a combination of 3 experiences in my life: traveling the world, teaching in Boston Public and working in summer camps.  In traveling the world I was amazed with how people in other cities knew their city so well.  While teaching in Boston Public I was always in awe about the number of high school students who were so uninspired in school and had no aspirations for higher education.  While working at a summer camp I established a program called “Urban Adventure“. This was a two week specialized program that took youth into the city of Boston each day to experience it behind the scenes. 
   




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3. It was sometime during 2006 that these 3 experiences culminated in my head to form the singular idea of providing urban children with a program in their own city; one that would give them an exceptional and inspiring learning experience.  In turn, this experience would provide these children and youth with one simple, yet obviously lacking asset: knowledge.  The children and youth, I then reasoned, would be empowered through a knowledge equity.
   




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5. The naming of ‘TUSI’ came about quite differently.  I knew exactly what my idea was about, but to pick a name that could both reflect the essence of the idea and be catchy was a bit trying.   After several attempts trying scores of words in the English language I began to think that creating a word using “urban” was going to be my best bet.   I then looked into prefixes and suffixes to see if I could match one either before or after “urban”.   After many amusing mixes I came across “soph”.  It was perfect! A sweet secondary result of learning “soph” was that I learned the real meaning of “sophomore”.