BELLOWS FALLS — Children and parents in Meeting Waters YMCA's ASPIRE program at Rockingham Central School recently launched their Togetherhood initiative with two projects to benefit Our Place Drop-In Center.
At the request of Our Place Director Lisa Pitcher, Y-ASPIRE children and parents at the Bellows Falls program have taken on two projects in support of the regional drop-in center and food pantry.
The first was the development of a poster encouraging people to eat more fruits and vegetables, items Our Place has made more readily available in their food pantry in recent months. The Togetherhood team also made recipe books featuring vegetables and fruits available at Our Place.
The second Togetherhood project, which was kicked off at a recent Family Night, is the collection of personal care items, in small packages. Pitcher informed the Togetherhood leadership team that things like toothpaste, lotion, soap and shampoo are always in need and, given the rate of homelessness and transience, having these in small packages is important.
The Y-ASPIRE Togetherhood team has set up collection boxes at Rockingham Central School and Meeting Waters YMCA's Bellows Falls office at 49 The Square.
Togetherhood, the Y movement's signature program for social responsibility, is run by Y members in partnership with their local Y. It is designed to be run by a service committee made up of Y members working as volunteers, and a single Y staff person, the Y staff advisor. In the case of Meeting Waters YMCA, one of just a few of the nearly 3,000 Ys in the country without a facility or “members,” children and parents in their Y-ASPIRE after-school programs make up the service committee.
“Service-learning has been a central component of Y-ASPIRE since we created the program in 1998,” said Susan Fortier, the regional Y's program director.
This track record, she said, was one of the reasons cited by the national YMCA in choosing Meeting Waters as one of just 100 Ys in the country to partner with them in the development of the program and process.
Fortier notes that Togetherhood has strengthened Meeting Waters YMCA's service-learning process by intentionally engaging parents in leadership and planning, along with kids and Y staff.
“In the Togetherhood model, two 'members' are recruited to lead the service committee which, in our case, are two Y-ASPIRE parents - Brianne Dunleavy and Denice Brown. They, in turn, have gotten other parents involved. This is a nice additional step that has not always been present in all of our previous service-learning projects.”
Meeting Waters Y's administrative coordinator Rachel Edens is the Y liaison to the Togetherhood committee. Edens directed Tusculum College's Center for Civic Advancement and focused her Master's dissertation on “Service-Learning in Non-Profit Organizations.”