The New Solutions Impact Council  works to identify community driven solutions that are impacting local communities. Kona Kai Coffee located on 4th and Gowe in downtown Kent is a small business that has passion for good coffee and food and for supporting our young people gain the skills they need to move forward successfully in their lives. Kona Kai recently received the 2011 Restaurant Neighbor Award by the National Restaurant Association. Congratulations…

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…

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…

Greetings from the New Solutions Impact Council!   We wanted to give a quick update to all of our readers that UWKC’s New Solutions Community Impact Council has been working very hard on several key projects.  At the December meeting, we discussed our progress and ongoing work  involving the faith community with UWKC to a greater extent.  This will provide the New Solutions Council and UWKC as a whole, more opportunities to find out what the needs are of people who traditionally are served only by their…

The New Solutions Community Impact Council had our most recent monthly meeting last week and it was a very productive, informative and interactive meeting!  After welcoming everyone and doing our normal introductions, we went on to discuss our thoughts on the many new and different ways that our council can stay connected with our local community here in King County as well as how to obtain information from community members, leaders, stakeholders, etc.  This conversation was both exciting and inspiring as we brainstormed our ideas and had…

United Way of King County recently went through a major reorganization in our Community Services Department (this is the department that allocates the money to various non-profit direct service organizations that our Fundraising Department raises).  As a result of this reorganization, two new Community Impact Councils were born, Strengthening Our Community (SOC) and New Solutions (NS).  Both councils do great work that helps to support many programs that work to positively affect the lives of thousands of King County residents each day!  The SOC council…