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It is a pleasure to welcome you to Penny Harvest Seattle/King County. This past year was full of exhilarating growth and change for the Common Cents program in Seattle. As we explored ways for our now 14-year-old program to involve more students in youth philanthropy and service-learning, we were reminded of how we got started. The idea for Common Cents came from the original Common Cents team in New York City, who gave us permission to use their name as long as all the money raised by students would be given back to the community. So it made sense to call the creators on the east coast to explore new ways to grow our program out west. Our timing was good. Common Cents had just received a grant from The Ford Foundation to replicate their model nationally! Immediately after hearing the news, I flew to New York City to observe their teacher training workshop and meet with kids from a Philanthropy Roundtable in Harlem. By the end of the meeting with those inspiring students, I knew I had to convince our team back in Seattle to adopt their model and become a full affiliate of the Common Cents in New York. While we have been successful at involving youth in raising money to meet community needs, the original Common Cents has involved substantially more youth – 489,720 young people! – in gathering pennies, making grants and taking action in its year-round, service-learning program. So in joining up we will be moving our Penny Harvest from spring to fall. We will be increasing the number of youth involved in grant making and service from 25 to over 500, and we will also expand our program from being seasonal to year-round with the addition of youth Philanthropy Roundtables and Neighborhood Service projects. Although 05/06 was a year of reflection and strategic planning, that didn’t stop Washington’s students from collecting thousands of coins and giving out a number of grants to address community needs. We actually held two coin collections this year. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina at the beginning of the school year, students in Seattle wanted to help. Eight schools participated in a special Katrina Relief Penny Harvest in October. Our citywide youth board decided to give the entire $3,550 raised to the Church Council of Greater Seattle to purchase furniture for survivors, who had relocated to the area. Piloting the new Penny Harvest program in 16 schools meant making two significant changes to our program. The first change was to switch our program’s focus from homeless youth and their families to myriad student-identified community needs. In this new model, students study the most pressing issues in their neighborhoods and make grants to local organizations addressing those issues. While homelessness may be one of the issues they decide is important to consider, we will no longer tell youth what issues they need to be concerned about. It only seems right that if kids collect, kids decide. Secondly, we are changing how we give out the harvest funds. In the past our youth board made up of young people recruited from across the city dispersed all of the funds. This spring, the individual schools were encouraged to form Philanthropy Roundtables, groups of students who will actually make the grant decisions. Erin Shakespeare, Deputy Executive Director of Common Cents in New York, made a special visit in March to train teachers in the Philanthropy Roundtable curriculum, which is designed to assist teachers in guiding their roundtables through the grant-making process. Six schools formed roundtables in April and carved out time amidst their WASL testing to make critical decisions about how to allocate their funds. (The youth community board continued to disperse the funds for the other ten schools.) Our Philanthropy Roundtables and our youth board collectively made 23 grants totaling $14, 964.75! Most of the grants addressed issues of homelessness and hunger in their communities. Two roundtables were particularly impressed by Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets, an organization that helps homeless youth and young adults transition into permanent housing. Other issues of great concern included healthcare, the environment, and animal welfare. In our Penny Harvest Yearbook, you will find a detailed listing of all the grants made by our roundtables and our youth board. We are grateful to the six schools that piloted the new model and are excited to officially launch this model in the 06/07 school year. Thank you to all of our school partners as we launch this new model. In keeping with building a national youth philanthropy movement, we will also be taking on a new program name: Penny Harvest. And for the first time ever, Seattle/King County students will be a part of a national Penny Harvest. On October 23, students in New York City, King County and the Albany/Capital Region, NY, will all begin harvesting pennies en masse. More importantly, we will be part of a national movement that empowers young people to become engaged citizens in their early years. Sincerely Yours, Michael Beebe Penny Harvest Director Seattle/King County Penny Harvest in Seattle/King County is administered by the Fremont Public Association. |
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