The Sudbury Foundation

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The Sudbury Foundation

Children, Youth & Families

Our Latest Grant Partners

We’re pleased to announce our grant recipients for the first half of 2015.

2015 Children, Youth & Families Program Grants:

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Mass/MetroWest, Worcester, MA $16,400
To purchase new customer relationship management software and ancillary hardware.

Doc Wayne Youth Services, Boston, MA $24,000
For a fund development consultation.

Jewish Family Service of MetroWest, Framingham, MA $9,000
To develop and install a customer relationship management database to support new performance management strategies for the fundraising department.

Nature Connection, Concord, MA $23,900
For a major gifts program consultation.

OUT MetroWest, Framingham, MA, $15,000
For a fundraising consultation.

Framingham State University Foundation, MetroWest College Planning Center, Framingham, MA $25,000
In partnership with MassBay Community College, to fund the development of strategic and marketing plans for the new MetroWest College Planning Center in Framingham and to evaluate the program after one year.

Massachusetts Audubon/Drumlin Farm, Lincoln, MA $13,675
To develop a business plan to replicate and expand after-school programming in high-need communities and to pilot a program in Hudson, MA.

Minute Man Arc, Concord, MA $5,000
For a strategic planning consultation.

Lovelane Special Needs Horseback Riding Program, Lincoln, MA $20,000
To support a major herd planning and re-building effort.

Discovery Museums, Acton MA $22,000
To fund the redesign and content redevelopment of the Museums’ website, with a focus on accessibility.

Friends of Resiliency for Life, Framingham, MA $25,000
To help pilot the expansion of the RFL program into Framingham middle schools.

John Andrew Mazie Memorial Foundation, Wayland, MA, $10,000
To pilot the position of Director of Strategic Partnerships for a four month period.

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2015 Sudbury Program Grants:

Foundation for MetroWest, Natick, MA $45,000
Over three years, for continued support for the Sudbury Youth In Philanthropy program.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Sudbury, MA $15,000
To help subsidize the cost of the 2016 Global Leaders Summit in The Hague.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Sudbury, MA $9,050
To upgrade technology at the award-winning student newspaper, The Forum.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, Sudbury, MA $9,000
For a comprehensive analysis of property holdings for planning and preservation purposes.

Parmenter Foundation, Sudbury, MA $7,000
To fund the development of a stand-alone website for the Foundation as Parmenter VNA merges with Care Group Home Care.

Town of Sudbury/Selectmen’s Office, Sudbury, MA $7,500
To engage the town’s board of selectmen in a team building and strategic communications consultation.

Town of Sudbury, Sudbury, MA $7,055
To purchase an Advanced Life System (ALS) training simulator manikin that will enable enhanced training scenarios for the Fire Department’s Paramedic and Emergency Medical Technicians.

Sudbury Valley Trustees, Sudbury, MA $24,600
To support ancillary activities to enhance the recently-acquired Landham Brook Marsh conservation area (formerly known as Johnson Farm) in Sudbury.

Posted June 23, 2015

A Productive Path for Youth

Photo by Lacey Roper, unsplash,comSometimes the best way to instill a sense of worth into youth who are troubled or struggling is to offer a hands-on work opportunity where they can learn and grow surrounded by caring adults who believe in them.

The specifics don’t really matter.

The program can focus on cooking or art or sports or philanthropy. Participants may indeed end up as chefs, museum quality artists or generous donors.

Or they may not.

The true objective has as much to do with social and emotional health as it does with skill building. These types of programs have proven successful in giving teens and young adults a sense of self and purpose that directs them away from destructive behaviors and guides them on a path that is productive and positive.

We’ve been pleased to support many such progams in MetroWest. A few include:

Tempo Young Adult Resource Center/Green House Graphics, a program of Wayside Youth and Family Support Network
While trying their hand at painting, drawing, graphic design and other art forms, the young adults in this program gain satisfying creative, technical, business and social skills. A supportive teacher and other staff keep youth on track by providing clear rules and setting individual goals.

The Food Project
Each summer 100 youth from diverse backgrounds come together to grow sustainable produce on urban and suburban farms while developing important leadership, teamwork, diversity, and civic participation skills. This (literally) down and dirty program is led by a team of counselors who make the experience fun, worthwhile and, in many cases, transformative.

Cooking up a Culinary Career, a joint project of Employment Options and Quinsigamond Community College.
This culinary certificate program enables young adults with mental health issues to acquire back-of-the-house kitchen skills in a supportive community. Sensitive handholding by staff enable students with a variety of challenges to be successful.

Youth in Philanthropy, a program of the Foundation for MetroWest
While learning about grantmaking and actually awarding funds to nonprofit agencies, these high school students gain skills in leadership, public speaking, fundraising, teamwork, budgeting and building consensus. Staff sets a collegial tone that enables the teens to bond with one another and, at the same time, learn more about themselves.

Strong youth development programs provide meaningful engagements. Our region could benefit from more programs like these.

Photo courtesy of Lacey Raper
Posted on May 21, 2015

Catch the Read Aloud Habit

Catch the Read AloudBabies are remarkable beings. Long before they begin school, infants and toddlers are learning at lightning speed.

From birth to age 5, babies brains will make trillions of connections between billions of neurons. Brain size doubles during the first year, and by age 3, a child’s brain has nearly reached its adult weight. Children build vocabulary, learn new concepts, gain pre-literacy skills and form the foundation for all future knowledge and learning.

But just how much babies learn before they begin school depends in large part on their parents and early caregivers. Nobody is in a better position to teach, nurture, talk, sing, or read aloud to young children than they are. Yet, many don’t realize how powerful a simple family/day care ritual – like reading aloud 15 minutes per day – can mean to the academic and emotional success of children.

According to Read Aloud 15 Minutes, a non-profit organization working to make reading aloud every day for at least 15 minutes the new standard in child care:

  • More than one in three children arrive at Kindergarten without the skills necessary for lifetime learning
  • More than 15% of young children are read to by family members fewer than three times a week.
  • Only 48% of children in the U.S. are read to everyday.

“We strongly believe if parents understood how important their role is as first teacher, and the difference that reading aloud for 15 minutes every day from birth can make, they would absolutely do it,” says Read Aloud 15 Minutes Co-Founder and Executive Director, Bob Robbins. “When parents understand that talking, playing, singing and reading aloud are not enhancements, but are instead requirements, for their child’s development, we will see huge leaps in children’s readiness for school and life.”

March is Read Aloud 15 Minutes Month. Is your early childhood  or parenting program encouraging reading aloud everyday to infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers? We encourage you to jump on the Read Aloud bandwagon. You can download some helpful posters and handouts here.

Posted on March 16, 2015

February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month

TeenDVMonthThe statistics are disturbing:

  • One in three adolescent girls report that they have experienced physical, emotional, or verbal abuse by a dating partner.
  • It’s estimated that two-thirds never report that abuse.
  • The Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds that 1 in 10 teens report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner.
  • Girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of intimate partner violence — almost triple the national average.
  • Approximately 70% of college students say they have been sexually coerced.

(More statistics here.)

There are good programs around to help teens, educators and families face this troubling and hard-to-talk-about issue. Local and online resources include: REACH Beyond Domestic Violence, Voices Against Violence, and Break the Cycle.

Raising awareness – through this month’s Teen DV Awareness campaign and other activities which educate people about the extent of the problem and help them learn to talk more openly about it — is a positive start. It sounds a bit trite but it does take a village to cope with issues like teen dating violence.

We need to ask ourselves: Do our children have enough caring, supportive adults in their lives who they can turn to if they find themselves in unhealthy relationships?

If you run a youth-serving agency, are you doing all you can to acknowledge the issue and to foster meaningful dialog between your staff and teens about healthy peer relationships?

Posted on February 4, 2015

 

The Value of Mentoring

Be someone who mattersMentoring — whether formal or informal — is a powerful tool to keep young people on the right track, particularly kids who are disconnected from their community.

A new study commissioned by MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership with support from AT&T, and written by Civic Enterprises in partnership with Hart Research, surveyed 1,109 young adults ages 18 to 21 to assess their mentoring experiences while they were growing up.

The study, The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring, found, among other things, that the mentoring effect can be a significant factor in reducing the number of youth disconnected from school and work, in increasing social and economic mobility, and in creating more productive and prosperous communities.

Highlights and Insights

Youth with mentors are more likely to report positive behaviors and less likely to report negative ones.

  • At-risk young adults who had a mentor are more likely to aspire to enroll in and graduate from college than those who did not have a mentor (76 percent versus 56 percent).
  • At-risk young adults who had a mentor are more likely to be enrolled in college than those who did not have a mentor (45 percent versus 29 percent).
  • At-risk young adults who had a mentor are more likely to report participating regularly in sports or extracurricular activities than those who did not have a mentor (67 percent versus 37 percent).
  • At-risk young adults who had a mentor are more likely to hold a leadership position in a club, sports team, school council, or another group than those who did not have a mentor (51 percent versus 22).
  • At-risk young adults who had a mentor are more likely to volunteer regularly in their communities than those who did not have a mentor (48 percent versus 27).

Young people believe mentoring provides them with support and guidance to lead productive lives.

  • Youth report that formal mentoring programs provide a variety of benefits, and most commonly offer that they receive advice about school, get help with school issues and/or schoolwork. They also make reference to receiving help to address life problems, assistance in getting a job, choosing a career and getting into college – though these benefits were less commonly reported.
  • Youth in informal mentoring relationships commonly offer that their mentors provided developmental, more than academic, support. These mentors conveyed advice and encouragement to help them make good decisions, taught young adults how to make the right decisions and follow the right path and become motivated.
  • Nearly nine in ten respondents who were mentored report they are interested in becoming mentors. In addition to confirming the value of mentoring, this desire to become a mentor also strengthens the earlier finding that mentoring is linked with higher rates of leadership and volunteering and offers a pool of future mentors to be activated.

The field of mentoring has grown significantly but a mentoring gap exists.

  • One in three young people overall (34 percent) and even more at-risk youth (37 percent) report they never had an adult mentor of any kind (naturally occurring or structured) while they were growing up.
  • Nationwide, that means today approximately 16 million youth, including 9 million at-risk youth, will reach age 19 without ever having a mentor.
  • Youth who struggled with attendance, behavior, and course performance are 10 percentage points less likely to have an informal mentor than those without these risks (57 percent versus 67 percent). Four in five (79 percent) youth with these off-track indicators do not have a structured mentor.
  • On a positive note, an estimated 4.5 million at-risk young people will have a structured mentoring relationship while growing up.

Locally, there are lots of mentoring opportunities – both formal and informal – that support at-risk youth. But are there enough? Probably not. Is your agency doing it all can to foster meaningful relationships between youth and caring adults? January is National Mentoring Month, a good time assess programs and services through a mentoring lens.

Mentoring Resources:

The Power of a Mentor to Change a Young Life

Mass Mentoring Partnership
http://www.massmentors.org/

Mentoring: National Mentoring Partnership
http://www.mentoring.org/

The Search Institute
http://www.search-institute.org/content/what-kids-need

Posted January 8, 2015