Birchwood DREAM Quarterly Report June - August, 2017
Greetings from DREAM! As the semester drew to an end and the children and college students finished with school, wonderful Summer DREAM activities began, starting in June and stretching to August. The Champlain-Summer mentors and Birchwood community were brimming with DREAMiness and here is a summary of happenings that occurred during the somewhat sunny months.
Highlights from the quarter include: ●
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Summer DREAM kicked off in the Birchwood community center with a craft and discussion about what families wanted to do with DREAM over the summer. Summer activities were led by school-year mentors, Deborah Kosnar and Ashley Devereaux three days a week. Birchwood Summer DREAM celebrated a successful summer of DREAMy activities with a culminating trip to the Whale’s Tale Water Park in Lincoln New Hampshire! After 2 years as a Program Empowerment Director, Julia Dillavou, finished her service with DREAM. She plans to remain involved with DREAM youth while she applies to graduate school. Across DREAM’s 3 regions, 14 full time AmeriCorps members began their service in the DREAMCorps National Americorps Program on August 28th, including 6 new PEDs in Vermont! Birchwood DREAM welcomed Ashley Devereaux and Olivia Richer as this semester’s Co Chairs! They are looking forward to inspiring growth and fostering an inclusive community within Birchwood DREAM. Joining them on the leadership team are Tatum Robinson, Tyler Bedard, and Shaye McHatten, in the roles of fundraising, event planning, and communications coordinators. Birchwood DREAM also welcomed Deborah Kosnar as its 2017-2018 Program Empowerment Director.
Participants Mentees Total: 13 Weekly Programming: ●
Mentors Total: 8
Early on in the summer, teens came to Burlington to meet up with school year mentors. The group took on the Vermonster Challenge and together ate 20 scoops of ice cream with toppings!
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DREAMers took many local field trips including to the Milton Farmer’s Market, North Beach, the Sandbar State Park, Sam Mazza’s for berry picking, and Isham Family Farm! DREAMers spent many rainy hours in the community center playing Apples to Apples, making snacks, and singing karaoke! They spent many sunny days outside the community center playing games, doing crafts, and enjoying the weather! Youth spent an afternoon sailing on Lake Champlain courtesy of the Community Sailing Center in July! Teens competed against each other in a “Chopped” Challenge, where they split into groups and each group made a meal with mystery ingredients! For their final days of summer programming, Birchwood DREAM went to the park and made a slip and slide in the neighborhood!
Special Events for Children and Mentors: ● DREAM received a Summer Readers’ grant from CLiF (Children’s Literacy Foundation). Local author and illustrator, Jason Chin, gave a presentation about his books and his writing/illustrating process to 30 youth from our Burlington area programs. Capacity Building and Fundraising: ● Through our annual summer appeal we raised close to $50K. ● DREAM spent a lot of time this quarter investing time in laying the foundation for our new National AmeriCorps grant. ● We received a challenge grant of $10K to purchase a van for transportation. ● DREAM organized our first (of what we hope will be annual) fundraising event by participating in the Race to the Top of Vermont. Staff, AmeriCorps members, board members, and alumni all hiked/biked/or ran to the top of Mount Mansfield and raised over $7K! ● We welcomed a new program site, Applegate Housing Community in Bennington, VT this summer! Youth were able to participate in our summer programming and six have signed up to participate in school-year DREAM. Camp: ●
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This year we hosted 79 campers over the course of the summer representing EVERY Vermont DREAM community!! About one fifth of the campers had never been to camp before! In late August we broke ground for the lodge! The lodge will give us capacity to host more youth for longer periods of time year-round. In addition to the lodge, a staff cabin also went up thanks to the help of our awesome summer AmeriCorps members!
Teen Accomplishments: ● Seven teens participated in a week long College Road Trip where they visited nine colleges all over Vermont and ended their trip with a weekend at Six Flags in New York. ● Summer members ran teen specific programming once a week including trips to Summervale, teen talks, and bowling trip. ● The Dartmouth programs and the Bennington and Poultney programs both went on High Adventures to California! o Twelve teens and nine mentors from Dartmouth spent ten days exploring San Francisco, zip-lining through Redwoods, and camping in Big Basin State Park. o Two teens from Bennington, two teens from Poultney, and five mentors spent a week exploring Los Angeles! ● Six teens served as Counselors-in-Training at Camp DREAM this summer, and another 6 teens served as Mentors-in-Training during community programming! Alumni: ● Alumni are investing in a new alumni management system so to help alumni better stay in touch and provide more career-oriented resources to our DREAMers. Office: ● ●
We welcomed Mike Ewan to our team as our Chief Operations Officer! Through our new National AmeriCorps grant we brought on fourteen AmeriCorps members across our 3 regions.
Thank you for your ongoing support of DREAM. If you would like additional or more detailed information, please contact me by email or by phone. You can always look back at past reports or other programs’ reports by going to: http://dreamprogram.org/mentoring/vermont/local-program-reports.
DREAM big, Deb Kosnar Program Empowerment Director dkosnar@dreamprogram.org 802.338.8979