Alhamedellah ILIA Receives Award for Third Year from Community Foundation of Howard County

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. - July 27, 2014 - PRLog -- By the grace of Allah (swt) Islamic Leadership Institute of America (ILIA) has received an award for the third year in a row. The 2014 award will be utilized to prototype an innovative coaching program through the integration of ILIA's EmpowerOne coaching and mentoring program and its Internship program with its I Can Lead leadership development certification.

ILIA has been offering youth coaching and mentoring since 2010 through one of its six cornerstones, EmpowerOne, where youth of all backgrounds in high school and college have been able to enroll in one of four tracks. Students would typically enroll for a duration ranging from 4 to 52 weeks to develop skills to enable achieving certain goals or addressing specific challenges. Common reasons students enroll in EmpowerOne are improving chances of University scholarships, organizational skills and academic advancement, career growth and poor habit transformation. In 2012 ILIA has introduced a counseling offering to EmpowerOne for students who wish to focus more on transforming poor habits into opportunities.

Internships another of the six ILIA cornerstones has been available to students in grades 6 through post graduate since 2010, providing opportunities for students to develop professionally and augment their acquired leadership skills through practice and application.

I Can Lead (http://www.icanlead.com/) one of four certification programs offered by ILIA was introduced in 2011 as a specialized certification track for incarcerated individuals. The program has since been offered at the Howard County Detention Center during the winter academic quarters each of 2012 and 2013. The program could was not offered in 2014 due to lack of qualified instructors and funding. Through a 14-week program students are exposed to two main styles of leadership, self and goal. Students complete 3 text books and weekly tests and a final examination and are required to receive a grade of B or higher to receive credit for the work. I Can Lead has been accepted by Howard County Detention Center as a standard offering for all inmates and not just Muslims.

Through the grace of Allah (swt), ILIA has recently been recognized as a leader in human development and has been asked to join the Howard County Re-Entry Council and act as an advisor on the topics of coaching and mentoring. ILIA has also joined other initiatives in the County where the organization provides insights in areas of leadership development and youth education and development issues.

The increase in the number of new youth offenders in our communities and the increased chances of recommitting crime at the hands of those who have already experienced detention is alarming and requires special attention. Working in partnership with a number of correctional facilities offering the I Can Lead program (http://www.icanlead.com/), ILIA has gained five years of experience dealing with youth in a correctional environment through mentoring youth offenders and devising mechanisms to reduce the future crime rates.

The proposed ILIA ‘EmpowerOne - Internship Program’ is a youth mentoring, empowerment and professional development program providing youth offenders with one-on-one custom tailored mentoring and guidance accompanied with the provision of a professional environment where they get the opportunity to learn and prepare themselves for their professional lives. The program is targeted to address youth who have been incarcerated between the ages of 13-22 years. To date alhamedellah ILIA has achieved great success with the youth that came across EmpowerOne and continued past re-entry. Ex-offender youth who joined EmpowerOne ranged from ages 13 to 20, and all have witnessed significant improvement over periods ranging from 4 weeks to 24 weeks through one-on-one custom tailored coaching, through augmenting the existing EmpowerOne program with Internships and I Can Lead youth would be able to develop a sharper mind-set about self and community.

We believe that such programs have a great impact on the behavior of youth who have been in the correctional system, and it greatly reduces the chances of returning to criminal behavior through leadership development particularly focusing on self-leadership and goal-leadership styles.

The award will allow ILIA to prototype the new model and develop a high level framework for its implementation. To support ILIA in this or other initiatives please visit its website at http://www.islamicleadership.org/general-donations/