This month, TOGETHER! participated in the first ever Give Local online giving campaign, and we are amazed by the results! Fifty of you donated to our campaign, raising $3,550 to support the expansion of Community Schools into Rochester and Yelm. Your support helps us create more school-based Community Resource Centers, connect more students and families with needed resources, and build more supportive communities for all our young people. Thank you! We can't do this work without you.
We'd also like to thank the Community Foundation for coordinating Give Local; Coldwell Banker, Greene Realty, and Olympia Federal Savings for sponsoring the campaign; South Sound Partners for Philanthropy for sponsoring Giving Bonus Wednesdays; and the Dawkins Charitable Trust for providing a matching grant, ensuring that your donations will go even further.
These funds will support programs like Right From the Start, which coordinates story times and play groups for children ages 0-5 while coordinating resources for their families, and Yelm Community Schools, which connects middle school students and their families in Yelm to networks of support to ensure they have everything they need to succeed in school. All of our Community Schools programs share, at their core, our values of equity, community mobilization, and systems change. We believe that all students deserve an equal chance to succeed in school and in life, and we are committed to building systems that work for everyone. But we can't do it alone -- your support means so much. Thank you for being a part of our community!
This holiday season, let’s Celebrate TOGETHER! All year round, we offer programs and services that enrich our community by caring for some of our most vulnerable members: our children. TOGETHER! works across sectors to advance the health and well-being of all young people through impactful youth development, health promotion, community engagement, and family support programs. But you already know that – if you’re reading this, that means you’ve made it to our website, probably through our newsletter or social media accounts, meaning you’re already a supporter of our organization, either as a donor, a volunteer, or just a friendly community member. Thank you for coming this far with us.
No one is quite sure what the future holds. 2018 bears the promise of new projects and partnerships that will serve our community in ways sorely needed, but also new challenges, some of which we can’t foresee. All we know is that we want to be there to support those youth and families who need us, the ones we already know and the ones who are yet beyond our reach. We want to be there for our community and help that community grow, no matter what happens.
With every backpack we give to a child before their first day of school, with every connection made between a student and a staff member they can trust, with every day that kids have somewhere safe, fun, and supportive to go after school, our community becomes a little bit stronger, a little richer, and a little more equitable. Every student should have an equal chance to succeed in school and in life. Our work is to make sure they do.
During this season of giving, you have the chance to be a part of that work. It all starts on #GivingTuesday, the day when we take a break from the shopping frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and give something back. We hope that you will consider TOGETHER! on this day, and help us reach our goal of raising $5,000 to kick off our year-end campaign!
CS Lewis wrote, “You’re never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Click here to help us dream the dream of a world where all young people are supported, healthy, safe and valued.
TOGETHER! is excited to be moving into the next phase of our partnership work with YWCA of Olympia's Intercultural Foundations program. Since October 2016, TOGETHER! and Intercultural Foundations have been working together to assess and improve our individual and organizational capacities for building inclusion and equity in our community. This coming phase will consist of reviewing our policies, procedures and organizational structure with our Board of Directors and the Intercultural Foundations team and making revisions as needed to ensure alignment with our values of equity, mobilization and systems change.
from YWCA of Olympia:
"The Intercultural Foundations program of the YWCA of Olympia is built on the belief that if we invest in tools to build intercultural competence, we invest in a better world for all. We consult with local organizations to assess and improve their culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion, at both the individual and institutional levels. By providing leaders in our community with the necessary tools to work across cultural differences, we create space for the perspectives of folks who are most impacted by marginalization to be centered and heard.
The Intercultural Foundations team is thankful to have had TOGETHER! as one of our first project partners. With this group, we have created a space to probe the depths of our socialization, revealing how implicit bias and internalized oppression impact our ability to make change in the community in an effective and equitable way. The commitment of TOGETHER!’s leadership to the process of deep internal assessment and structural change has been crucial to the program’s success, and serves as a model for our future projects."
We feel the same way! Thank you, Intercultural Foundations, for your guidance and support through this transformative process. Your service to our community is truly invaluable.
TOGETHER! is thrilled to announce our participation in the Community Foundation of South Puget Sound's Give Local campaign!
Give Local is an opportunity for the community to support the rural expansion of TOGETHER!'s Community Schools initiative, and with Give Local, your support goes even further thanks to a generous matching grant by the Dawkins Charitable Trust.
To view and support TOGETHER!'s campaign, visit our campaign page. You can support us by donating, liking, sharing the campaign, commenting on our social media posts, and telling your friends! If you wish to share the campaign with your networks, you can sign up as a Champion under the "Champions" tab. Learn more about what you can do as a Champion by reading this Champion Guide.
All proceeds from the campaign will support the expansion of Community Schools programming in Yelm and Rochester through Yelm Community Schools and Right From the Start. You can help make sure that all kids in Thurston County have the same opportunity to succeed in school and in life! Thank you for your support.
Since the fall of 2014, TOGETHER! has been building networks of support for students in the Tumwater community thanks to a strong partnership with Tumwater School District. This summer, another district has stepped up to join us in the work of supporting the whole children, teens, and families who make up our school communities. Congratulations, Yelm Community Schools, for partnering with us to providing comprehensive services to your students and their families.
Yelm Community Schools is one of the fastest growing districts in the state, and they recognize the value of community partnerships in ensuring their students get the supports they need all the way from pre-kindergarten through high school graduation. To start, TOGETHER! will place a full-time staff member in Yelm’s two middle schools: Yelm Middle School and Ridgeline Middle School. With the support of an AmeriCorps VISTA, they will begin to build the bridges between school and community resources that eventually turn into a comprehensive system of support, a safety net that can catch our most vulnerable students when they need us the most.
Thank you, Yelm Community Schools, for making this commitment to your students, and welcome to TOGETHER!’s powerful network of partners!
TOGETHER! is proud to be a partner in the Graduate Yelm! initiative, which is being lead by Yelm Community Schools.
Graduate Yelm! is a community-wide effort to advance graduation readiness at all times, starting in kindergarten and continuing until students walk across the graduation stage. Alongside the City of Yelm, Yelm Community Schools and TOGETHER! will be working with other community partners towards the goal of achieving a 100% graduation rate.
Students who graduate and move into a post-secondary education, whether college, trade & technical schools, the military, apprenticeships or other work development programs, significantly increase their employment opportunities and career earnings. We know that the graduation readiness mindset begins as early as kindergarten, so our goal is to support the entire Yelm community and school district in fostering this mindset in their students from the very beginning.
As a partner with Yelm Community Schools, TOGETHER! provides opportunities for family engagement and support that make the difference for struggling students. It's hard to focus on graduation readiness when your basic needs are not being met at home or at school, so we work with students and families to make sure that every child has what they need to be successful at school and in life: enough to eat, adequate school supplies, access to needed healthcare, a way to get to school, and all the other big and little things that come up every day.
Thank you, Yelm Community Schools and City of Yelm for being our partners in this work. We are so excited to work with you.
TOGETHER!’s annual Awards of Excellence is an opportunity to honor those youth whose grace and strength shine through the stories of success they share with us. In the last two years since the event’s return, we’ve awarded youth who have balanced their academic and career goals with family responsibilities and personal circumstances. Awards of Excellence honorees parent young children; support friends, family members, and themselves through addiction or mental health issues; and respond to injustice in their community by bringing people together to heal and take action.
These young people are exceptional not only because of their accomplishments, but because of the often-unseen challenges that they have met and struggled through on the way. Whether they face barriers due to their race, class, gender, ability, immigration status, system involvement or family structure, what Awards of Excellence honorees have in common is the resilience that defines their leadership.
Two awards will be granted based on the theme of “Service Above Self.” These will be awarded to youth who have shown leadership in service to their families and communities. Too often, acts of service that occur outside of traditional volunteer opportunities can be overlooked for recognition. We ask our nominators to look for those students who perform acts of service in their immediate communities, supporting their peers and family members, whether or not they have the time and resources to volunteer in traditional ways.
We’d like to thank Gateway Rotary for being the Presenting Sponsor of this event for the third year in a row. We are proud to continue this tradition for another year and to provide the recognition of achievement that is so vital to the continued success of our youth.
If you know a young person who you think qualifies for this award, you can nominate them here. The survey will close on March 31st, 2018.