TOGETHER! is thrilled to welcome Right from the Start, and early learning center that serves families with children ages 0-5 in Rochester, WA, to our family of programs. Right from the Start, previously overseen by The United Way of Thurston County, engages whole families and communities with educational opportunities for parents as well as children, family engagement and community building events, Parents as Teachers group connections, and referrals to community resources.
Services like weekly story times, play groups, and parenting classes welcome families to the center and allow Nancy Villanueva, program coordinator, the opportunity to assess need and coordinate services for families. Every family that attends a Right from the Start program gets connected to a supportive community where they can access support and resources they might not have known were available.
Family engagement and community partnerships are the cornerstone of TOGETHER!’s work for youth, so Right from the Start is a perfect fit with our organization. Access to high-quality early learning is crucial for ensuring that students are ready for kindergarten, setting them up for success through the rest of their K-12 years. Right from the Start not only makes early learning accessible, but provides comprehensive services that support the whole child and whole family. It’s the kind of work that TOGETHER! is proud to partner on, and we are very excited to have the opportunity to do this work in Rochester.
Tumwater School District and TOGETHER! have been working together for three years to bring necessary in-school support to the students of Tumwater and beyond. One of our most powerful and popular programs is the annual Back to Basics event series, where volunteers from the medical community come together to provide back-to-school care to students at no cost.
Our first Back to Basics event took place on August 1st at Tumwater High School. An incredible team of volunteers from Tumwater Family Practice, Providence Tumwater Valley Physical Therapy, Olympia Orthopaedic Associates, Providence Sports Medicine, St. Peter Family Medicine, Tumwater Vision Health, and Tumwater School District’s own Health & Wellness Department provided free sports physicals to over 250 middle and high school students. Participation in after-school sports is shown to increase school engagement and pro-social behavior in students, but lack of medical access is a common barrier that prevents students from accessing these benefits. At Back to Basics Sports Physicals Clinic, we not only provide sports physicals for free, but also work to connect families with insurance coverage and primary care physicians, so that the rest of their healthcare needs can be met into the future.
The second and final event was the Back to Basics Immunizations Clinic on August 22nd at Peter G. Schmidt Elementary School. Immunizations were administered by Thurston County Medical Reserve Corps and community partners Hands On Children’s Museum, South Sound Reading Foundation, Tumwater Youth Programs, CHOICE Regional Health Network, Tumwater School District, South Sound YMCA, Head Start, and Tumwater Timberland Library tabled outside the clinic with information and resources. In all, the clinic served 88 families and 105 students. Among those 105, 132 vaccinations were given to 65 students who needed additional immunization to meet school requirements.
Financial support for Back to Basics 2017 was provided by Kaiser Permanente, City of Tumwater, and Tumwater Walmart.
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 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! 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!
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!