United Way of King County is funding several wonderful programs designed to support young children and their families in helping those children arrive at kindergarten ready for school. Two such programs are delivered by New Futures, an agency that has been serving refugees, immigrants, people of color, and low-income families for over 17 years. New Futures has a first-hand understanding of how people in these communities are disproportionately impacted by not having the necessary educational foundation. Many of the parents served by New Futures have…
It’s National Volunteer Week, and we recognize the hundreds of community members who’ve served with us in the past year as Volunteer Readers at our 39 sites around King County! We’re not the only ones who think they’re great—we receive words of gratitude from teachers and directors at the sites throughout King County where they read.
Teachers at Seattle First AME Child & Family Development Center had this to say:
“We appreciate how they are always on time, sometimes bringing their own books to share…
The Early Learning team is excited to continue our important work and wanted to update our blog readers on what we are doing! The Volunteer Reader Program continues to grow and we currently have over 100 volunteers who go out into our local community to read stories to children ages 3 – 5 years old, but we want more volunteers! In addition to building important pre-reading skills in young children, this program is very rewarding to both the child care sites that host the Volunteer…
It has been awhile since our last blog post but the Strengthening Our Community (SOC) council wants our readers to know that we continue to work on a plan that will help to guide our next steps. This plan will not only help guide our work but it will also help us to identify and focus our work for FY12.
In other news, we will have outcomes open for application in the winter of this year. Please stay tuned regarding funding opportunities on our website…
The Eastside Domestic Violence Program (EDVP) realized that they had a gap in their system, that gap was their ability to appropriately address the needs of Limited English Proficient (LEP) survivors of domestic violence needs. Along with other domestic violence service providers, the Eastside Domestic Violence Program, in recent years, has had a growing interest and commitment to make their agencies more accessible to LEP survivors. Addressing this issue takes a deep understanding of how the needs of this population are connected to human rights…
In the Fall of 2009, the New Solutions Council funded several community projects through our small grants application process. These awards are in most cases granted to a program on a one time basis. However, this year, we decided to provide additional funds to a few projects that were doing an excellent job using innovation and/or collaborative efforts to address critical needs in their various communities throughout King County. There were four projects that were determined by our council as projects we were interested in…
Greetings from the Strengthening Our Community Council! Over the past six months, the SOC council has gone through some staffing transitions as well as shifting our focus from the application and agency contract process to the research and planning phase of our work. Currently, our council is hard at work on developing a strategic and investment plan that will help to guide our work in the subject areas that we cover: Employment for adults with developmental and other significant disabilities, Youth development and academic success,…
The New Solutions Council is currently in a very exciting place! We are working on many different ideas, plans and projects that will help further our impact on the local community. One of our biggest projects is working on our new Strategy & Investment Plan. This plan will help guide our work in an even more concise way than we have experienced since the forming of our group in February 2009. It will help us to assist local communities who have identified and implemented strategies…
In fall of 2009, New Solutions funded several projects and over the next few months the final reports will be coming in. The Brothers and Sisters Project combined the resources of Child Care Resources, American Red Cross and the Community Schools Collaborative to address the high number of youth that aren’t able to participate in after school activities because they are needed at home to care for younger brothers and sisters. The project was implemented in three different schools in South King County: Evergreen Campus…
The New Solutions Council met last month and had a very informative and interactive meeting. Our council volunteers led portions of the meeting and had great ideas about how we can move forward and ways to measure that we as a group are achieving our goals and how we can best convene groups to discuss various topics out in the community! We are about to start the process of checking in with some of our small grants funded projects to see how their programs are…
