We have all been really busy which is why we haven't posted in such a long time. We've been out of town two weekends in a row - our first weekend was at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the UCC and our second weekend away was for a retreat at Fox Island, a beautiful island just south of Seattle.
I could probably write a post on each of the weekends listed above but I wanted to share with you a little update of what I've been working on at my agency. In April, I began coordinating on a project that will take up the rest of my internship at the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, Project Cool for Back-to-School. Project Cool is a program that gives brand-new backpacks stuffed with school supplies to homeless students in pre-K - 12 grade who are in shelters and transitional housing programs. I've only just started working on Project Cool, but I know that I'm going to love it.
One of the most important things I've learned so far is that Project Cool is about so much more than just the backpacks; it's about making sure that a child who is facing the daily chaos of homelessness gets to start school on even footing with his classmates. It's making sure that a child who has an unstable living situation, is able to enter school in September with the same tools for success as any other child in her class. And finally, it's about making sure that a homeless child doesn't have to worry about whether they are going to face the stigma of not having enough money to buy school supplies or a backpack at school. This is what Project Cool is about for the almost 1,300 kids we serve in King County, and this is why I am so excited to have the chance to coordinate the project this year.
If you want to learn more about Project Cool, please feel free to visit our website: http://homelessinfo.org/what_we_do/project_cool.php
-Kathryn
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