Fall 2014 T4T Newsletter

After a very successful fiscal year ending this June, we looked at our numbers and thought we would share with our supporters this encouraging information about our growth.

 

It is no surprise that the bulk of T4T’s revenue comes from our programs and materials memberships. However, it is interesting to see that this has increased to an even greater percentage of our overall revenue over the last 18 months. For the year ending in December of 2013, 89 percent of what we took in came from our memberships and programs with only 11 percent of our income from regular donations. Six months later, for the twelve months ending in June of 2014, programs and memberships were 94 percent of our revenue with the remaining 6 percent from regular donations (even though our overall donations have increased).

Also noteworthy is that in 2013 our popular S.T.E.A.M. carts (which come with classroom curricula) plus our materials memberships accounted for 65 percent of our income while program events, including professional development workshops, brought in 24 percent of the yearly income. By the middle of 2014 those numbers evened out so that 49 percent of revenue was from materials and 45 percent was from programs.

Our successful outreach programs, such as “The Ultimate Recycling Machine”, “What Goes Where”, and “Eco-Vehicles” help us to get out in the community. However, some of our best work is done in the classroom as we continue to collaborate with teachers to develop a curriculum that inspires learning.

During our professional development program held this summer (in conjunction with the L.A. Unified School District School Improvement Grants), I watched teachers helping each other practice techniques for using T4T’s open-ended materials. These techniques teach important science and engineering practices, which are at the heart of the country’s new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

I learned a lot during those three days and thought I would share some of it.

First, I learned that while everyone has been talking about the new standards they have not yet officially been adopted by LAUSD and other school districts. Still, these standards are seen as the ‘new wave’ of best practices in teaching, along with the Common Core Standards – and both are based on hands-on learning. T4T materials are an integral part of this teaching method. Students learn less from reading about concepts in books and more by engaging, exploring, and experimenting to see how things work. Students are now putting the scientific method and the engineering design process in action!

Teachers are trying to fully embrace these new standards by beginning to teach this way and T4T is helping. Most of our teachers learned these new practices through the T4T professional development programs offered in the last 2 years. Many of them said that the T4T program was extremely helpful and made them feel empowered to proceed with the new NGSS. These teachers are grateful for the opportunity to be taught by one another as they go through the process together.

For the teachers who have been using T4T materials in the classroom, the impact that they report seeing in their students makes it worth working hard to extend T4T’s reach into more classrooms and school districts.
What could be better than this? Teachers say that before they had T4T materials to use in hands-on learning projects, students would use materials from home and only 50-75 percent of projects were finished. With T4T materials, the completion rate was 100 percent.

While T4T programs bring in much of our income, we do need donations to help us grow our outreach and professional development programs. As always, we ask for your help.

Nina Zacuto
T4T Board President

Let me start by wishing you the best of the season in whatever holiday you will celebrate. This feels like a good time of year to take a moment to catch up. We are in a very celebratory mood at T4T – let me share a little about why.

 

We had a most incredible season! Summer camp at Balboa Magnet School in Northridge was an experience to write home about. Campers aged 8-11 made headsets in order to learn about how sound travels. Every one of those young campers left with an individually designed and engineered, working headset. Very impressive since this is a high school AP physics lesson and most of these kids were just entering middle school! If you are interested in the next camp here is the link to give us your email address and we will send you information as soon as we have dates and locations.

There may be a winter camp the first week in January!

You will be able to see a video documentation of this soon on our new web site, www.T4T.org – watch for that in the next few weeks! You can still search for ‘Trash for Teaching’ online, but we’ll be going by ‘T4T’ for short – and our email addresses will now all end in @t4t.org.

Most of you know that Shiva Mandell recently returned to architecture, his first love. We are confident that he is shaking things up at Gensler.

Mindy Schwartz is the new Director of Creative Programming. Mindy has fit in with great style. She brings her experience as a high school science teacher along with curriculum development expertise, which she honed at the California Science Center. She blends her academic credentials with an inquisitive, yes-we-can attitude. The schools we work with have universally voiced their approval with her professional development programs and her way of engaging students. At the office, we just think she is great to have around.

Isai German joined us to explore the possibility of building labs for science, technology, engineering, art and math experiences (STEAM Labs). So far he has two that will be completed by the end of the year and five more to be built with a grant we received as a result of losing the LA2050 campaign. Yes, thank you for voting. We were proud of our showing but we didn’t win. By the next newsletter we may be able to tell you who but for now we can just tell you that a local artist offered a $25,000 grant for us to build STEAM Labs in five Title I schools. There is a registration/application process being designed as I write this so stay tuned. I hope the new web site will make it easier for you to stay engaged.

We love what we do. It is beyond rewarding when someone reads about a project and offers to support it with a $25,000 grant. We are humbled, honored and motivated. We will share photos and if this artist agrees, we will tell you more about the individual. For now, they are someone we respect and admire. The grant has been received and the Labs are being planned.

Coming soon, a Robotics Competition in which the robots must be built from found objects, such as old motors (ours come from L.A. Slot Machines), a switcher from an old train set, and materials from our warehouse. We may allow small expenses for items required and not found but that amount will be very small. This competition in designed to be possible for anyone with imagination regardless of the family wallet.
In the next newsletter I will more fully introduce you to Adam Herbst, the young man who has been building digital renditions of the items on the NASA Carts. Once his app is complete, it will allow a student to build a prototype prior to working hands-on with the material. He has been doing this as a volunteer but we are trying to find a way to make him a more permanent part of the team.

Enough for now, but clearly there is more to come! The team is growing, the organization is growing and we could use your help in one of three ways. 1) We need volunteers so if you are a science enthusiast or an artist, we need you. 2) If you know a manufacturer who might have materials to donate, we need them. And 3), we are always happy for financial support. Like this grant, we will put it to good use in schools that don’t have funds to do this for themselves.

I hope you will come see us if you haven’t lately. If you will be making donations this year then please remember us on Giving Tuesday December 2nd. And just an idea – a materials membership would make a lovely holiday gift for all those educators and artists in your family!

Leah Hanes
T4T Executive Director

This summer brought a big transition in staffing to Trash for Teaching.

Shiva Mandell, our former Program Director, decided to move back to the world of architecture after many dedicated years with T4T. In August, we hired Mindy Schwartz as our new Program Director – she comes to us from the California Science Center, where she worked on professional development opportunities for L.A. teachers. Prior to her move to California, Mindy was wrapping up her master’s degree in Conservation Ecology & Sustainable Development at the University of Georgia. Mindy has a well-rounded career history – having worked at an interesting blend of zoos, nature centers, and outdoor schools before becoming a high school math and music teacher. Her background in environmental education and nonprofit management will serve her well at T4T! Mindy is originally from New Jersey and outside of work she enjoys cooking, photography, team trivia, and swing dancing.

We also hired Isai German to be our STEAM Lab Coordinator. Isai comes to us from Iridescent Learning, a non-profit that teaches science and engineering to students in under-served communities. He helped develop curriculum and prototypes for project based experiments to communicate curiosity, creativity, and persistence. Isai also has a background in architecture – he studied Architecture Technology at Los Angeles Trade Technical College with a concentration on community-involved design. Isai also created the Sustainable Architecture Club and established a partnership with the US Green Building Council for LEED certification. Isai was born and raised in Bakersfield, CA and transplanted to L.A. in 2005. He is an avid lover of PIXAR and Buzz Lightyear, with an affinity towards bacon.
Stay tuned in the next newsletter for an introduction to Adam Herbst, who has been diligently working on a NASA app for T4T!

Steve Price is currently involved in helping establish contacts in central California for an expansion of T4T, which he believes will be a great new asset for teachers in implementing new standards in their classrooms. Steve Price founded and leads ERC Data Solutions in program development, evaluation and research for school districts, colleges and universities. Through ERC he develops proposals and evaluates state and federally funded programs for a variety of K-12 and higher education initiatives to improve education. Steve’s passion is linking talent with opportunity, which includes individuals and organizations. He says “I believe this passion began in one of my first jobs as a vocational counselor, placing people in jobs, and developed at Fresno State where I wanted to see talented future teachers linked with opportunities in schools as undergraduates.” At Fresno State, Steve founded the Teaching Fellows Program, which continues to place undergraduates and future teachers in paid after school positions, as they complete their degrees and credentials. There is nothing he finds more energizing than working with innovative and entrepreneurial educators to find ways to implement their ideas to meet school and community needs.