Greetings from the Volunteer Reader Program!  Last Thursday evening, we had another wonderful Volunteer Reader Program Training and we would like to give a special thank you to Maren Ostergard with the King County Library System for providing the training and for another great job!  Volunteer Readers learned about the dialogic reading method, 6 essential Early Literacy skills (Print Motivation, Print Awareness, Vocabulary, Narrative Skills, Letter Knowledge and Phonological Awareness), were introduced to a variety of new books, were able to ask questions of current…

I love the “Why the Fork” campaign because it is giving organizations like the Somali Youth and Family Club an opportunity to educate us about the needs of the communities that they serve.

Like this: Do you know how large the gap between SNAP and Basic Food benefits and he price of Halal food is?  It’s big enough that most low-income Muslim families have exhausted their benefits by mid-month.  Compounding this problem is a Food Bank system that does not have the resources to receive…

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…

KOMO’s Elisa Jaffe joined me and a group of volunteers from Old Navy at our new cannery program in Kent. Each week, volunteers can nearly 10,000 pounds of vegetables and transport them to local food banks.  Without this program, this healthy food would go bad before it could be distributed to the community.    The story will air at about 4:30 p.m. today on KOMO 4 news.   Thanks to everyone who is volunteering and doing great work out there, and thanks to KOMO…

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…

There’s a part of me that has actually been enjoying the heavy rain that’s been pelting the Puget Sound region.

Obviously I don’t live in a flood plain.

Because of problems at Howard Hanson Dam, which controls water levels in the Green River, there’s a higher risk of flooding this winter in Auburn and the rest of the Green River Valley south of Seattle.

Most disaster-serving organizations like American Red Cross have an existing pool of trained volunteers and likely won’t need more. However, other…