Executive Director Update

Wow, what a summer!

This month I was asked to join the L.A. Regional STEM Hub Advisory Committee at the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. I am honored and look very much forward to this engagement.

Operations

As we mentioned in the last newsletter, we are opening our second location in Fresno. We took over a 6000+ sq. ft. warehouse and we filled it. We will have a grand opening there in a month or two but the members are already in there picking up supplies for the 2016-17 school year. We have loaded six transport trucks with over 75,000 pounds of material for Fresno. You can’t even imagine what that took to prepare, not to mention the hoarding that was necessary to get ready to fill that space. For those of you who, like me, worry about carbon foot prints, these trucks belong to OK Produce and they bring produce to L.A. and go back empty. We have been able to move this material without adding to the environmental concerns or our budget worries. Thank you to OK Produce and Randy Mehrten from the Fresno County Office of Education who helped make this happen.

We are in the final stages of negotiations for a merger. I can’t tell you more than that right now but it is exciting for us.

Our 4th Annual Summer Science Institute was a success according to the teacher mentors we worked with and Darlene Torres at LAUSD who manages the program for the School Improvement Grant division. Beyond the Bell sent middle schoolers here every morning for three weeks and our Inventor’s Institute Summer Camp at Balboa Gifted/High Ability Magnet was once again a huge success, according to the campers and their parents.  Adam Herbst has been working on our digital programs and moving us into the digital age, with more efficient  ways to run our point-of-service sales and membership database.  I am so very proud of this team and we are welcoming a new member this month to assist us while Mindy Schwartz is on leave.  Mindy Sanchez (yes, another Mindy!) will be here in the warehouse with us for the next few months and hopefully beyond.  I hope you will all welcome her. We think she is great.

Volunteer Activities

We have expanded our relationship with two organizations that supply us with help during the week. Non Profit Solutions sends us employees who are not able to work at their job for medical reasons but are able to help us in the warehouse. This has allowed us to take more appointments with members. Jewish Vocational Services has sent us another helper and promises that there are more in the pipeline. Our role is to work with these individuals to make sure they leave here with a reference and work experience. This group has helped us prepare many pounds of material and with the packaging of units for both here and the new Fresno location.

UPS is asking us for another Day of Service, which will help us book hours toward this year’s grant cycle. I was at UPS last week speaking to the drivers. I thanked them for the work they did for us last year and explained the impact that work had on our planning and direction for here and Fresno.

We have had two groups of volunteers from all over the world here through the L.A. Chapter of the Visitor’s Bureau. I attended a conference that they put on last spring and they have brought us visitors from Egypt, Syria, Jerusalem, China, Taiwan, Japan, and many other countries. They volunteer with us and learn about philanthropy in America while they help us understand the same about their respective countries. It has been a fabulous exchange for us.

Awards

We are the 2016 Legacy Project recipients for the U.S. Green Building Council (Los Angeles Chapter), which is both exciting and invaluable.  Isai German took this project on when he saw the posting for the competition. He applied and when we were told we had been chosen we were invited to a cocktail party at the USGBC-LA offices downtown for the announcement. Along with the financial award they are making changes to our space to help us cool it off in the summer and keep it warm in the winter. There will be a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony on October 2nd.   Let us know if you would like to attend – your children are welcome that day, too.

Supervisor Knabe’s office has given us a grant for the second year in a row to build STEAM Labs in two of the schools in his district. The fact that they are back for a second year is a rewarding vote of confidence and confirmation that our work is needed and appreciated. We still have 43 Schools on a wait list hoping we will receive funding for them to receive STEAM Labs.

Just this morning I was informed that we have been voted one of the top 100 Philanthropic organizations in LA by C-Suite Quarterly. The CSQ L.A. Visionaries Summit  + Spirit of the Community Awards will take place in October when they will honor Tara Roth (President, Goldhirsh Foundation), Jon Rose (founder, Waves for Water), Andy Bales (CEO, Union Rescue Mission), Robert Ross (President &  CEO, The California Endowment), and Timothy Potts (Director, The Getty Museum), among others. Our Visionary of the Year and cover feature is NantHealth CEO and L.A.’s wealthiest resident, Patrick Soon-Shiong. We were nominated by our Board President, Brent Bushnell. This is very exciting.

Looking Forward

We are being approached from groups all over the country (and the planet!) for ideas and help with understanding how to do what we are doing. We are now exploring how to create a ‘STEAM Lab in a box’ so that we can supply our materials and system to schools all over the country in the way that our NASA Carts are now being enjoyed in North Carolina, Maryland, and Illinois (to name a few places where they are being shipped).

We are looking forward with enthusiasm. If there are ideas you would like to share with us or comments that you feel could help us build on our momentum please do message us on our Facebook page, or call us directly.  We’d love to hear from you.

Leah Hanes, PhD – Executive Director

 

A Note from the Board President

 

Hello, T4T members and fans!

I hope you all had engaging and playful summers.  All of us affiliated with T4T have been busy thinking about new ways to incorporate T4T’s educational philosophies into innovative programs and business models.  I’m excited to see how T4T spreads its mission over the course of the next school year.

T4T is a nominee for this year’s CSQ 2016 L.A.  Visionaries Summit + Spirit of the Community Award – an honor reserved for innovative businesses, community leaders, and organizations which set trends and inspire across industries.  T4T is indubitably on the cutting edge of where education, STEAM, and sustainability intersect.  Those of us directly involved with T4T might be a tad bit biased, but we have certainly seen first-hand how T4T impacts lives, inspires, solves problems, and sets trends.  I’m sure I don’t have to convince you of that, but please think about us the next time you see an award that T4T could qualify for.   Awards like this go far beyond good press for us – they connect us with broader networks that can ultimately help us get funding to go into more schools and work with more students and teachers.

One of the advantages of serving as both a CEO of my own company and board president of a nonprofit  is that I can think of unique ways for us to partner together.  This Thursday Two Bit Circus is hosting a fundraiser event at our offices, which will benefit T4T.  The event, called Re-‘Purpose’ful, will feature interactive games, virtual reality, music by DJ Mike, local brews served by Good Bar, and a repurposed ‘Maker’s Area’ where you can get your creative juices flowing.  This will be a really fun and unique way to network – and even better, a great way to support T4T.  The event starts at 7pm – click here for more info and to get tickets.  Hope to see you there!

Do you ever wonder what a Board of Directors actually does for the nonprofit that they help to govern?  Well, it’s likely a bit different for each organization, but a big part of what we do is dream.  We dream up new ways to spread our mission and achieve our projected goals.  We dream up new partnerships that could be mutually beneficial.  We dream up where we’d like to see our nonprofit in 5, 10, 50 years.  If you were a fly on the wall in our board meetings, I’d like to think that you’d be inspired by the conversations we have and the charismatic, invested people behind those conversations.  It truly takes a village to cultivate and grow a small nonprofit like T4T, and I’m so proud to be a part of our ‘village’.

Wishing all you educators an inspiring school year ahead!

Brent Bushnell – Board President

Our Partnership with USGBC-LA

The U.S. Green Building Council-Los Angeles (USGBC-LA) selected T4T.org as their annual Legacy Project recipient to help create what we are calling ‘The Eco-Tech Maker Space’.  The project will be unveiled for the Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Los Angeles this fall.  The Greenbuild LA Legacy Project is a gift from the national USGBC and USGBC-LA Host Chapter to Los Angeles for hosting the conference, and will be a permanent project providing an enduring means of service, education, and thanks to the local community. Greenbuild, held in a different city each year, attracts over 20,000 global attendees and includes the largest green building expo, numerous education sessions, workshops and speakers, a Legacy Project, tours, art installations, and adjacent events. The Eco-Tech Maker Space will be built in the city of Gardena, and will initially service five area Title 1 LAUSD schools, before being opened to the general community.

“With 15 of every 20 new jobs in California requiring S.T.E.A.M. skills” (Los Angeles Times 10/31/11), students, parents, and teachers will benefit from integrating technology and project­-based learning.  The goal is for the Eco-Tech Makerspace to host digital outreach programs related to 3-D Design, modeling, coding, and stop motion animation, while utilizing upcycled materials and tools to grasp the tactile approach of learning.

Students—drawn from five Title 1 schools within a 1-mile radius of the project—first helped build out the 500 sq. ft. space’s infrastructure themselves, beginning this past April.  Starting the process this way helped to develop a sense of ownership and empowerment.  Once complete, the space will provide students the opportunity to consider a problem (e.g., design a futuristic car), brainstorm ideas, design a solution, build a prototype, and test/retest it.  The outcome can be very different from the original idea.  The goal is to encourage them to understand the process of creation, which includes trying again and again until they are satisfied with the results.

We are so grateful to be working with USGBC-LA on this project, and can’t wait for the Ribbon Cutting on October 2nd!

Isai German – STEAM Labs Manager

 

Summer Camp Recap

This year’s summer camp stayed true to the engineering design process as we focused on inspiring our campers to ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve.

The first week of camp was all about “Inventions and Innovations” and every child was given the task of imagining and creating something that could potentially make the world a better place. In addition to asking our young engineers to identify a need or problem that they aimed to hypothetically address through innovation, we invited everyone to be just as challenging and inquisitive towards their fellow campers by adding the role of interviewer to their repertoire. Campers were able to interview and record their peers as they prepared for a Shark Tank-inspired tradeshow. The kids had a blast creating a prototype model of their invention, but they were also able to learn business concepts as they were encouraged to market their product and were given a strict budget to pull it all off. Nicknamed the T4T “Spark Tank”, our mini tradeshow was a hit – complete with logos, slogans, business cards, and even free swag!

Once our campers spent a whole week brainstorming ways to make our Earth a better place, we expanded our reach for the second week’s theme of “Interplanetary Exploration”. Focusing on building life support systems and space travel, our ultimate goal for the week was to be able to create our own “Marsville” habitat. Children participated in several design and engineering challenges before they were able to obtain the necessary knowledge to begin building a life-size structure that could house up to ten individuals. On the final day of camp we opted for an inflatable design, giving the campers nothing but tape and construction plastic to create their habitat, and a large floor fan to erect their structure with air pressure. After a lot of hard work and many failures, pride filled every camper’s face as their home on Mars successfully inflated to allow plenty of room for the entire class to enjoy, marking the end of another great summer at camp.

Mindy Sanchez – Programming Coordinator

 

New Shopping Hours, & More!

T4T is undergoing rapid changes as we head into the fall of 2016.  Here are a few that you may not be aware of yet:

  • We have rearranged our inventory in an attempt to make it easier for you to shop at the warehouse.  It is a more open feel with much clearer signage and more organization.
  • Our signature T4T kits are now available online, to be shipped directly to you.  These are pre-assembled sets of materials that are geared toward a particular project, but come without specific instructions so that a child must use their creativity to assemble it.  See the full list at http://www.t4t.org/kits/.
  • We will still be open every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, but we will also be open when possible on other days as well.  You can check the website anytime to find out if we will be open that day; there will be a message showing the hours we will be open.
  • If you want to check out a real STEAM Lab to see if it is right for your school, come on down to the warehouse where we have a model set up complete with tools.

Adam Herbst – Program Assistant

 

Creative Corner – Programming Update

Just when I think things will start to slow down around here, we getting busier than ever.  For a nonprofit that is pretty well correlated to the LAUSD school calendar, we sure had a lot of things going on here over the summer.  While many students and educators were enjoying their much-deserved vacations, T4T was busy with the following programs:

  • Planning and running a 2-week summer camp in Northridge
  • Planning and running a 3-day Summer Science Institute for selected LAUSD teachers
  • Coordinating and facilitating professional development workshops at our warehouse
  • Entertaining 3 weeks of field trips through the Beyond the Bell summer school program
  • Planning and facilitating field trips and outreach programs for local summer camps
  • Coordinating volunteer efforts from Easter Seals of Gardena

And much, much more!

Since January, I’ve been participating in The Nonprofit Partnership’s Emerging Leaders Program – a 10 month long training program for managers and directors in the nonprofit sector, who are seeking mentorship and additional skill development.  I was selected for the program, along with 14 other young professionals, and each month I spend one full day in training on a variety of topics.  We’ve covered everything from 990 forms, to supervising staff, to fundraising tactics.  I’ve found each session to be extremely valuable and have already started using what I’ve learned at T4T.  Another helpful component of the Emerging Leaders Program is the mentoring program.  Each participant gets paired up with a mentor – someone who has been working as an executive director in the nonprofit sector for at least 20 years.  My mentor has been running an equally small nonprofit in Long Beach for years and I’ve benefitted greatly from our meetings.  She has shared tips and tricks from the trade, insight into budgeting, and successes and failures that she’s learned from.  I hope to continue my mentorship with her long after the program concludes.

Whether you are a parent, an educator, or an artist, I hope you had as productive a summer as we did and take that productivity with you into the new school year.

Mindy Schwartz – Director of Creative Programming

 

Upcoming Events

 

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