December Newsletter
Dear Partners,
Great things are happening on many fronts.
SVP has really be in the news lately. See the articles and links below for an enjoyable and informative read:
- Sustainable Business Oregon: Occupy the Crib. A blog posting by moi on the occupy movement mashed up with our community goal
- Stanford Social Innovation Review: One of our Silicon Value Partners, Lance Fors, was the feature of the article, Giving 2.0: Getting Together to Give
- The Oregonian: Intel offers retiring employees a $25,000 incentive to go back to work — for nonprofits
- Portland Business Journal: Intel retirees can earn $25K to work for nonprofits under new program
AND…one of our Partners is the featured speaker this month for the national group, Bolder Giving. Bold Conversation with Douglas Tsoi Ten years after Douglas left a career as a technology lawyer to align his work with his values – first as a teacher at a Quaker school then as a local environmental advocate in Oregon, he pushed himself to take another major step in his personal journey. Aiming to “meet his needs, not his wants” and inspired by his Quaker beliefs and Jill Ginsberg’s blog “Hundreds of Hundreds”, he began giving first a third and then a half of his salary away. Not only is he giving big, he’s also inspiring others to give by directing his donations to create “seed funds” at the Oregon Community Foundation, offering matching funds as an incentive to encourage other Oregonians to give.
SVP’s Business Plan for helping 16,000 children a year. We have enjoyed visiting with you over the past 2.5 months in the House Parties about where SVP Portland is headed in our 2021 Community Goal to prepare vulnerable children to their potential by kindergarten. This is not an effort we plan to do alone. It’s also not one that’s going to be simple and quick to fix. Want to know HOW we plan to do it? One of the ways is by creating a new Investee (currently named, The Little Engine). The business plan has been emailed out to the Partnership as well.
SVP Partner gets a MILLION books for Portland kids! While the business plan lays out the road map for the long game on changing the lot in life for kids and our economy, one strategy we know is needed is MORE BOOKS FOR KIDS. There are over 100,000 children in the greater Portland Area who have little to no access to books of their own. Partner Mark Van Ness has gotten a company out of Indiana to donate a million gently used kids books PER YEAR for the kids of Portland who don’t have them. He and Partners Julie Edwards, Joe Eberhardt, Sam Rosenbaum and former Partner Steve Acheff have been figuring out how to get them here and cover the costs so that we can begin working with already-established distribution networks to get them in kids hands.
What can you do to help? Friends of the Children is taking the early lead on one piece, a pop up bookstore to cover the costs–and just received a donated shipment of 75,000 Children’s books. The sooner they are sorted and on the shelves, the sooner they can be distributed and shared–hopefully in time for the holiday season. We are looking for volunteers dedicated to supporting this local social enterprise. Bring yourselves, your family, your friends, your neighbors–any amount of time you can dedicate helps to get the bookstore operational and the books distributed to children in need.
When? 9am to 9pm on Friday December 9th thru Sunday December 11th Stay for as long as you want! There are no time shift obligations- every bit helps!!
Where? The Old Borders in Bridgeport Village ((right across from Crate and Barrel), 7405 Southwest Bridgeport Road, Portland
Early Childhood Forum: Exploring a Partnership with Renowned Early Childhood Researcher: Tues, Dec 13th at 11 AM All Partners are welcome to join Seattle Partners Dawn Trudeau and Bill Henningsgaard as they summarize a recent discussion with preeminent early learning researcher Dr. Craig Ramey, principal investigator of The Carolina Abecedarian Project, the 30-year randomized controlled study of the potential benefits of early childhood education on children of low income families. Dr. Ramey’s current focus addresses “going-to-scale” and rapid application of scientific findings.” This facilitated discussion will explore potential alignment between the SVP network and Dr. Ramey’ new phase of his research.
SVP Board Officers. It keeps getting pointed out to me that I haven’t introduced to the Partnership our Board Officers this year. The whole Board is doing amazing service this year on first steps to our Ready for Kinder Community Goal. Here’s the group leading the charge:
- Larry Fox, President
- Kirt Nilsson, Treasurer
- Bill Porter, Secretary
Stay connected. SVPP has been using social media as a way to keep you informed in real time about events, resources, and stories in the news pertinent to our goals such as education and social enterprise. Keep yourself clued in to the activities of our dynamic Partnership and consider following us on Twitter or LinkedIn, or liking us on Facebook. Tags: Early Childhood Forum, The Litle Engine
