Mission & Vision
Mission & Vision
Mission of the GO FOR IT! Institute:
The GO FOR IT! Institute provides the Seven Keys to Success© curriculum which teaches skills for building lasting self-confidence and achieving success in every aspect of life.
The GO FOR IT! Program is the proven system that empowers families, educators, and youth leaders to teach children how to develop their potential across all age, cultural, and socio-economic boundaries.
Vision Statement from the Founder, Judy Zerafa:
Everyone has an idea of what they want in life; yet very few know how to turn desire into reality. The GO FOR IT! Institute provides a well-tested and highly effective way of teaching adults and children how to achieve and succeed academically, inter-personally and economically. The Seven Keys to Success offer clear and simple strategies for achievement in every area of life…across age, gender, race and socio-economic boundaries.
The GO FOR IT! Program is a powerful response to the questions: How can we help our children? How can we empower families to thrive? How can we improve education? How can we create a more level playing field for our diverse population? How can we reclaim our country’s greatness?
Through my experience in offering the message of the GO FOR IT! Seven Keys to Success in classrooms, teacher trainings and parent workshops in more that 250 school districts nationally, the most frequent comments I hear are those regarding the challenges created by low self-confidence. In students, low self-confidence manifests as low academic achievement, bullying, school drop-out, adolescent crime, suicide, and sexual promiscuity. Teachers overwhelmingly agree that academic success has far more to do with a healthy level of personal confidence than IQ. Parents, teachers and school administrators talk about the disconnect between students’ understanding of the importance of education and the reality of opportunities in their future lives. The Seven Keys to Success are the life skills children as young as first grade can use to build healthy, lasting confidence. In addition to providing a profound understanding of the power of one’s attitude, along with strategies for developing an maintaining a positive one, the keys teach children how to identify their personal talents and abilities. The process of this discovery makes young children giddy with excitement about the unbelievable power within them. That connects them to a motivation for learning; directly tying their efforts to learn and achieve to their dreams. Early in the Institute’s history, we invited corporate leaders in the Denver area to visit a school on the day second graders were learning how to uncover and develop their own talents and abilities. Mark Bauman, then President of Starz Encore, was among the guests that day. He stood at the back of the auditorium, shook his head and said, “You have to see this to believe how powerful it is. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The Keys teach students how to complete the CYCLE OF ACHIEVEMENT. Through this process, students learn they have the power to succeed. They come to understand they are NOT victims of circumstance or background. They are able to do what we are all meant to do: that is to take responsibility for our own lives.
Sociologists tell us a society changes when ten percent of its population shifts their attitude or behavior. Today, there are 50,000,000 students in K-12 education in the U.S. Ten percent of that population, or 5,000,000, are the children of 2,220,000 families. What if the parents, or other involved adults, within those 2,220,000 families made a decision to learn and then teach these 5,000,000 students the how-to’s for developing and maintaining a positive attitude, believing in one’s self, replacing self-defeating behaviors with life-enhancing habits, making wise choices, setting and achieving goals, using creative imagination to accelerate goal achievement and solve problems, and being persistent? What would happen to the families, the communities, the country, if ten percent of families with school-aged children possessed these life skills and began achieving to their potential?
Wisdom tells us that Nothing Changes Until Someone Changes. We cannot wait for someone else to improve our lives, our country, our future. We must become the agents of change ourselves. I invite you to join us in a commitment for a better tomorrow through your choice and effort today.
Blessings and love,
Judy Z
