Monthly Archives: August 2012

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Project Stuff a Backpack Shoulders School Supply Costs

As kids head back to school, families undergoing financial stress can find the extra expense of school supplies hard to handle. As school budgets stretch tight, they are asking families to pick up more and more classroom expenses, and teachers often dip into their own pockets to make sure their students have what they need.

The YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit, as well as its generous members, are stepping forward to help families deal with this extra expense, totaling almost $600 for many families. At each Y location, they’ve been spending the month of August collecting donations of new backpacks, lunchboxes, and school supplies like crayons and notebooks. Donations go to schools in each Y’s service area, so they stay in the community.

it’s a huge help for families struggling to pay for new school clothes, sports fees and all the other extra expenses that come at this time of year. “The gift of a backpack stuffed with school supplies and accessories will help equip a student for success and relieve some of the financial stress parents are shouldering,” said Reid Thebault, president and chief executive officer for the YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit. “Families with school-age children face many financial demands and the current economic climate makes providing clothing, child care and school supplies even more difficult. This small contribution can be a significant one.”

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Teens Find Their Confidence

Middle school age kids are very hard to keep busy during the summer. They are too young to work, sometimes too young to stay at home alone, and too old for many activities. That’s the problem the Farmington Family YMCA faced this summer when planning their day camp for older youth. Because they had grouped campers by grade and not by age, the age range has been very wide in previous summers, which didn’t always work well for the oldest kids.

Katrina Stewart, who is Youth and Family Director at the Farmington Y, has two children of her own in that age group, and used what she wanted for her own children as a basis for reinventing the middle school age camp. She teamed up the littlest campers, who are ages 3 to 5, with the older kids, so the older ones could serve as role models. The campers also did service projects as well, beautifying the outside of the Y, putting bat boxes at Heritage Park, and packing food boxes at Gleaners Community Food Bank. They also organized a car wash to generate donations to the Strong Kids Campaign.

“We wanted to get kids more confident by setting an example,” says Mike Green, director of the older kids camp. “With them going into middle school and high school, and dealing with those social groups, if they are able to have those leadership values their friend base will change.”

The service projects the kids did were chosen to be long-lasting, something they can point to after the summer and know they had that impact. “A lot of them were resistant at first,  but they had a sense of satisfaction afterwards that they just helped somebody,” Mike says.

They also did a lot of self-knowledge activities to help them understand their own abilities in a positive way. They had one overnight trip to one of the YMCA’s residential camp, which they loved because “it was like a vacation,” said camper Kennon Stewart. Around the campfire that night, counselors led them in an activity meant to discourage bullying. Each child — and the staff — wrote a word on a piece of paper that someone else had called them that had hurt. Each of them shared their word, and counselors asked them to reflect on how it had made them feel and how another person might feel if they said those words to them. Then they balled up the paper, and each camper threw their word into the fire.

“None of us have ever said any of those things to each other,” says Kennon. “We have a bond now.”

The next day they had a field day with the young kids, which everyone loved.  Camper Brianna Ramsey developed a bond with a girl named Josie over the course of the summer.

Brianna says camp has made her feel more confident. “It has  made me realize I can have an impact on anybody’s life, young or old,” she says.

Jamel Cherry, another camper, liked the diversity at camp– kids came from all different schools. They did an activity of a making a root beer float to show how different people can come together and make something better than they would be apart from each other, which was really meaningful to him.

Katrina says she’s thrilled with how well camp has gone and the effect it’s had on the kids — so much so that they are continuing with some new teen leadership programs in the fall. “They’ve become a little family,” she says. “They’re showing very responsible and positive behaviors toward one another, because the focus was shifted from them to others.”

 

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Exhibit Sheds Light on Street People

If you spend any time in Detroit, you’ve seen them — the people huddled against buildings, standing at intersections holding signs, or sleeping under bridges.

But do you really see them? Bruce Giffin does. The longtime professional photographer was awarded a Kresge Arts fellowship this year for his project “The Face of Detroit.” He drives around the city and photographs street people, with their permission. While he’s looking for interesting faces, he says the project is also about showing the reality of these people who can be invisible.

An exhibit of his work is available in the lobby gallery of the Boll Family YMCA through the end of August. This will be the last time the exhibit is displayed. Giffin has done some photography for the Y, and it was a natural fit for him to have his creative work exhibited there.

The photos are mostly closeups, revealing the character and humanity in each person’s face. Giffin goes out to look for people to photograph and stops when he sees an interesting face, usually offering them a few dollars.The exhibit, which features about 40 prints out of 150 he has taken, will walk viewers through a whole gamut of emotions. The photos are presented without context except for the person’s name, usually. It’s all about the face telling the story, instead of Giffin doing so.

Very few of the people he’s photographed have seen the final product, Giffin says. They tend to be hard to find, although sometimes he does run across them again and they always remember him.

One thread that runs through all the portraits is a strong survivor instinct, he says. One photo is of a young man in a suit, walking down the street at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning with a sign that explained he was 18, ready to work, and had resumes. Giffin was very impressed by this young person trying to make it any way he could, at an time when many other people his age wouldn’t even be getting out of bed much less in a suit and literally pounding the pavement.

Another photo is of a man who uses a wheelchair and stays in a three-story abandoned house. He keeps a wheelchair on each floor, and maneuvers between them on his hands and knees,

“This is a kind of survival, and I think it’s in the drinking water in Detroit,” he says. “If you knock a survivor down they’ll keep getting up until you kill them.”

He knows his work can be difficult to think about, but he hopes people find the meaning in it.  “These don’t really sell because they are not really happy pictures, but you will walk away inspired by how they choose to live their life, at some level.”

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Kids Learn Life Skills at Camp

Summer’s “brain drain” is a very real problem. Children who are not exposed to learning over the summer, whether in a camp or in a less-structured home setting, can start the new school year having lost a significant amount of what they spent the previous year learning. And the problem is more serious among lower-income kids.

Camp Riley at the Farmington Family YMCA helps plug that brain drain, and give kids a fun, supportive, safe environment in which to spend their summer as well. The program is funded by The Riley Foundation, as well as the Y and Farmington Youth Assistance and serves kids ages 5-12 for nine weeks over the summer. They take over a school building provided by the Farmington school system, where qualified teachers help them brush up on their reading, math, and writing skills.

Older kids also had life skills sessions with social worker Doreen Brant focusing on bullying, goal setting, and career aspirations. Reaching kids at this age, before they start middle school, is a critical time to help them think about their aspirations and their values so that they continue on the path to success.  “They are great group of kids,” Doreen says. “They are very caring and accepting of others to begin with, and this gave them a little extra stuff to work with.” The anti-bullying sessions were especially effective, she said. Campers were working among themselves to defuse bullying situations, pointing out the behavior and stopping it.

Projects focused on serving others, as well; kids wrote letters to soliders serving in Afghanistan. They also had a “caring tree” where they could add leaves to the tree whenever someone did something positive.

Each year’s camp has a theme; this year’s focused on books and writing, and the kids journaled a different chapter every week. At the end of the session, the kids actually published and bound their own books. A grant from Dollar General paid for the supplies to do that and also provided each child with a backpack full of school supplies, as well as a journal so that they could continue their daily writing habit.

Parents like the program because it’s fun for their kids but keeps their skills sharp over the long summer months, and they know their kids are safe and having fun.

Each session ends with a jubilee. Kids perform a song and dance for their parents and show them what they have learned over the summer. This year, because of the book theme and because each child created their own book, the kids held a book signing as well.

Camp Riley provides a wonderful resource for the community, Doreen says. “The whole camp is a wonderful thing for these kids. A lot of them would just be home alone while the parents are working,” she says. “And the camp counselors really have an impact on the kids’ lives.”

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Friends Come Together to Help Y

About a year ago, Bryan Smith approached an acquaintance, Erik Meier. Both were young, active, ambitious entrepreneurs who had been introduced by a mutual friend. Bryan wanted to gather a group of like minded people to have an impact in the community and help each other out in their business lives as well.

“I just wanted to have a little more community impact and have a group of tight-knit individuals who could work together to accomplish something outside of our day-to-day jobs,” Bryan says. “We didn’t have a specific agenda or fundraising project in mind, and when we came together everyone had an idea or connection that made us realize we could accomplish some things.”

That meeting ended up being very fortuitous for the South Oakland YMCA. It resulted in a group of about eight young men who called themselves The Detroit Initiative. Through fundraising events, they have raised about $4,000 for the Strong Kids Campaign, and have promised to up that to $5,000 through a golf outing they are holding in September.

Erik was already on the board of the Strong Kids Campaign for the South Oakland Y, and as the group formed he made the case for its deserving the group’s support.

Scott Hankins, another Y board member, and Erik were already planning a charity event with the NFL Players Association, who raised funds for the Strong Kids Campaign; the group also pooled their resources for a “Get To Know the Y” night at the popular Black Finn bar in Royal Oak. Members who worked for bigger companies also asked that Strong Kids be included in their companies’ charitable giving.

All of the members of the group are in their late 20s or early 30s, which means a lot of youthful energy for the Y and also a chance for the Y to spread the word about all the good work they do among a segment of the community that may not be aware of the breadth and depth of the Y’s mission. Erik admits that even he didn’t realize the extent of what the Y did before he joined the board.

And now, thanks to the efforts of the Detroit Initiative, more people can go to camp, take classes, and be part of the Y community. The group plans to expand its reach to other causes while continuing to support the Strong Kids Campaign.

Joining Bryan and Erik are Jeff Glover, Rocelious Goodson, Mike Brown, Dario Chiarini, Trevor Weston, Rob Vogelei, Dr. Brandon Gordon and Tracy Parent-Morse.