Fall 2015 T4T Newsletter

All of us at T4T.org want to thank you for your ongoing support as members and material suppliers. If you are contemplating your year-end donations please think about adding us to your list.  From our T4T family to yours, have a wonderful holiday season!

As you may have read, we have a new Board President as of November 17^th – Brent Bushnell of Two Bit Circus.  We are very excited about his vision and energy. Who doesn’t dream about running away with the circus?!  We are touring with Brent’s STEAM Carnival in April and May so tell your friends in Seattle, Chicago, Charlotte and Dallas.

In early November we hosted our 2nd Annual Teacher Appreciation Day, where we spent the day thanking all of you who work hard to educate our kids. We honored Environmental Charter Schools, the Easter Seals of Gardena, Noe Zelaya from Murad, Mark Tremper of Pasadena Unified, Jennifer Montgomery from El Camino College, Matthew Lesniak from Sun Valley Magnet, and Bertina Yee from Playa Vista Elementary. I hope you will all join us for the 3rd event sometime in the fall of 2016.

Early in 2016 we will be opening the doors on the Fresno Chapter of T4T.org, thanks to a fabulous group of educators headed up by Dr. Steve Price, Randy Mehrten, and their ambitious cohort from the Fresno Board of Education. We are currently negotiating a lease and hope to have dates for you very soon. If you know manufacturers up in Fresno please send them this note. We are looking for their engagement.

Here at our Gardena flagship we passed the 900-membership mark in November and hope to be announcing the 1000th member soon!

I’m going to let each member of the team tell you a little about what they are doing. I would just like to end the year telling you that this team at T4T.org is awesome. We work hard every day to make sure we have ideas and materials to support your interests and efforts. Let’s change the face of education and make sure the students would vote it the best system possible. Let’s make stuff happen together in 2016.

Thank you for thinking of us as the year comes to a close.  No amount is too small to help. Click here to donate before 2015 comes to a close.

Leah Hanes – T4T Executive Director

As this is my first report as President of the T4T.org Board I would like to begin by thanking the outgoing President Danielle Egerer for her dedication and proactive year. Her determination to create a Strategic Plan (SP) gives me direction and clarity as I begin my two years at the helm. This is the first SP that T4T.org has had and it is specific, yet flexible with buy-in from all the Board! A tough job well done Danielle – thank you from all of us.

As we approach the beginning of 2016 we have a plan of action and ambitious but attainable goals for the next year. We want to serve 20% more schools. We want to build two STEAM Labs per month (mostly in Title 1 Schools) and we want to introduce our materials and professional development into new regions. The first of those regions will be in Fresno. A dedicated group of educators have been working for a little over a year to raise the money needed to open a T4T.org Chapter in their region and this month we are in lease negotiations for that space.

As founder and Chief Rabble-rouser of Two Bit Circus I am bringing T4T.org into the fold as we travel the STEAM Carnival around the country. T4T was part of the San Pedro event in late 2014 and the San Francisco event this past November. In 2016 we will travel to Seattle, Chicago, Charlotte, and Dallas and T4T will have a significant role in those cities. I envision T4T.org Chapters springing up where ever there is a manufacturing community. More on this soon.

As we say good-bye to 2015 please keep us in mind for material donations, year-end contributions, and any corporate or personal events you may be planning for 2016.

Brent Bushnell – T4T Board President

This school year, T4T began a new partnership with Brawerman Elementary School East, located in Koreatown.  It all started by building out their brand-new ‘Innovation Lab’ over the summer.  Gillian Feldman, Brawerman’s Principal, envisioned the space being used for weekly curriculum connections with all of their K-4 students, and thought the best way to do this would be to get T4T staff in there working directly with the students.  So, since September Adam and I have been working as part-time ‘Innovation Specialists’ at the school – coming up with ways to engage the students with creative upcycling, software programs like Tinkercad,  and hand-tools.

The process of engaging students with hands-on learning and open-ended materials becomes an opportunity to scaffold critical thinking.  The archaic classroom pattern: “lecture, repeat, and test” has evolved to a synergistic approach between a computer lab and shop class.  This space allows for students to examine and explore the engineering design process. The cyclical approach of addressing a problem, brainstorming ideas, designing a solution, building a prototype, and testing/retesting encourages students try again and again until they are satisfied with the results. The goal is not to make everyone an engineer, but to use this process to formulate success.

The opportunity for students to interact with hand-tools seems precarious, but we spent the first few weeks training the students in tool basics and tool safety – the outcome is a safe learning space with high rates of participation.  Our T4T materials are key components in all our labs.  Our mission in all of our programming is to rebrand the image of “trash” as educational resources for the STEAM disciplines, by fostering creativity and ingenuity. Technology is also part of the curriculum.  Every Brawerman student gets to explore spatial reasoning with Tinkercad, a rendering software.  The students design in 3D and build projects with our upcycled materials.  They can articulate scale, dimension and composition.  These projects have ranged from map-making in their social studies classes to making mobiles for their language arts classes.

Group collaboration is inevitable in many work environments. We value working with different people with unique perspectives, and encourage group work at Brawerman.  So, how does one listen and place value on so many unique ideas?  Here are a few techniques we have found that help in the classroom:  “You then me” and/or “3 before me” asks students to address others views before their own.  Placing students in groups does not translate to immediate cooperation, but acknowledging others views nurtures communication and respect.  This, in turn, produces community-built projects.

T4T’s partnership with Brawerman Elementary provides the ability to augment and mature a space for students’ innovation.  An open dialogue with faculty has provided the lab as an instrument for learning across all disciplines and an effective method to engage student involvement.

Isai German – STEAM Lab Coordinator

T4T has been steadily growing in program capacity since I began here in 2014.  As such, I’m happy to announce that we’ve recently hired a program assistant to help with our diverse programming needs.  Cara Fassino comes to us from the girl scouting world, and we’re excited to have her expand our program offerings to girl scout troops this winter.  Cara is originally from New York and got her bachelor’s degree from USC.  We are so happy to have Cara on board as T4T grows.

We recently started offering an ‘Institutional Membership’ to T4T – which is useful to larger organizations or schools that want to take advantage of our inspiring array of materials.  The memberships are in increments of $1000 and in addition to getting our warehouse materials you are also entitled to use our space semi-annually for staff meetings.  Many schools have found this to be an excellent perk of the membership – instead of having their faculty meeting at their school site as usual, they will take their teachers on a ‘field trip’ to T4T where they can meet, plan lessons, and shop, all at the same time!  Please reach out to me if you’re interested in setting up an Institutional Membership.

Lately we’ve been having lots of large volunteer groups come in on weekends to help us sort through recent donated materials, bag items, and organize inventory.  Words cannot express how helpful it is to have groups like this – like most small nonprofits, we are big on ideas but small on manpower.  Having an extra 10-20 people for an afternoon is like getting an extra week’s worth of work done!  Some of these groups come from local high schools or colleges, while others have been from local companies or even for a ‘grown-up’ birthday party!  You can sign up to volunteer on our L.A. Works profile page – click here to see their recent feature on T4T.

One of the projects I’m proudest of is our recent ‘Upcycled Art Challenge’, which culminated at our 2^nd annual Teacher Appreciation Day.  As you may know, Goodyear recently retired its ‘Spirit of America’ blimp and they generously donated the blimp envelope to us.  We had an abundance of this material just sitting in our warehouse and wanted to get it in the hands of local students and teachers.  We delivered 12”x12” squares of blimp to 3 local high schools and asked the art teachers and students to create an original piece of artwork out of it.  We asked them to consider the ‘Spirit of America’ as a guiding theme for their artwork, but other than that we left it open.  The results were astounding and a panel of guest judges picked 2 winners, both from Environmental Charter High School.  The photo on the left showcases just a few of the submissions – all of the upcycled artwork will be on display at T4T this winter (stay tuned!).

I’ll leave you with some photos of how we at T4T choose to enact our annual staff holiday party.  We had a casual lunch at the office and started the party off with a craft – making table centerpieces out of warehouse materials.  We then engaged in your typical ‘white elephant’ gift exchange, but not-so-typically required that everyone make their gift out of warehouse materials instead of buying something.  The results were impressive!  We hope you’ll consider ways you can reduce waste and upcycle this holiday season.

Mindy Schwartz – Director of Creative Programming

MLK Day of Service – January 18th

Last year’s first ever MLK Day of Service at T4T was a huge success.  With over 60 volunteers coming out to help us bag, sort, and organize materials in the warehouse, we knew we had to make this an annual event.  This year Antioch University will be sponsoring the event and we hope to have even more people come out for a fun day of service.

There will be two sessions – 9am-12pm, and 12:30-3:30pm.  You are welcome to sign up for one session or both.  We’ll have a pizza lunch at noon as a thank you to all our volunteers.  Children are welcome, but must be at least 6 years of age.  If you are looking for something fun to do on Monday January 18^th and would like to help out a small nonprofit, please sign up to reserve your spots.

Let Materials Lead the Way – January 30th

Our fabulous Director of Fun, Viki Stathopoulos, is leading another Let Materials Lead the Way workshop – this time for grades 1-5 teachers.  As always, the workshop will focus on getting comfortable using open-ended materials.  This time, we’ll branch out from creative play into designing robust lesson plans from these materials.  Come prepared to collaborate with other educators and learn some inspiring ways to transform our ‘trash’ into teachable moments.  Saturday 1/30/2016, 9am-12pm, $30 per person.  Fee includes $10 credit towards materials.  Must register in advance – (310) 527-7080.

Homemade Valentines Workshop – February 14^th

Can you think of a better way to spend Valentine’s Day than making your own homemade Valentine’s cards with your kids?  Join us Sunday morning for a fun and creative workshop where you can make unique cards and gifts out of scrap fabric, papers, beads, and more!  10am-12pm, $10/person.  Please sign up to reserve your spots.

STEAM Machines Innovation Fair – March 12^th

Join T4T and many other organizations at the Santa Monica Pier for the annual STEAM Machines Innovation Fair & Rube Goldberg Machine Contest.  We’ll be facilitating our own version of Rube Goldberg contraptions right on the pier, with an activity we call ‘Ultimate Recycling Machine’.  The Fair is free to attend and we guarantee you’ll be inspired by what you see!  Saturday 3/12/2016, 11:30am-5pm.  Learn more here.