SHENANDOAH,Iowa -- Happy New Year to everyone reading my first blog of 2019. On behalf of the Shenandoah Iowa Education Foundation, we wish you all the best for the upcoming year.
I would like to take this opportunity and update all of you about a very recent and rewarding planning session for our foundation.
During our planning session on Jan. 10, we spent considerable time talking about our vision and mission statements. When our Foundation began in May 2016, we discussed and prepared some talking points on why we were formed and what we were to be about. Now, our foundation board felt very strongly that we needed to go back and re-visit those talking points and make certain of our vision and mission statements going forward.
Why are these statements important for us and, really, for you, too?
These statements drive our purpose. These statements drive what we do, what decisions we make, and even what decisions we don’t make. I would like to share those vision and mission statements with you today, but I am going to wait until after our next meeting in February. At our planning session, our board members desired to make sure these statements are exactly what we want, so we tabled our final decision to our next meeting. I promise you, I will share those with you very soon.
I also want to give you a clear picture of our foundation’s endowment at the end of 2018.
As I said earlier in this blog, we began fundraising for our foundation in May 2016. Our endowment as of Dec. 31, 2018, was almost $73,000.
We sincerely appreciate everyone that has contributed to our foundation. Many of you know we instituted our “$100 Club” this past year, and we had more than 90 people join it by contributing at least $100 during 2018. This is a great start to our goal of reaching 1,000 people in our $100 Club.
We sought the help of KMA to help us reach those of you who call the Shenandoah area home. Through a series of personal advertisements heard on KMA, monthly talks with Dean Adkins or Don Hansen on KMA, and digital ads on www.kmaland.com, it was our hope that we found new ways to create awareness of what our purpose is and why we are here.
On behalf of all of us on the foundation, we thank KMA for their help and support. We plan to continue our partnership with KMA in 2019 to stay in touch with all of you.
Here are some activities and events that we are planning in 2019:
--Come to agreement on our vision and mission statements.
--Set some long -term goals to build and enhance our endowment.
--To hold a fundraising event in Shenandoah for the sole purpose of building our endowment toand help us reach our vision. It is our hope and desire to find a fund-raising event that our community enjoys as an annual event.
--Continue our partnership with KMA to reach more people whom would like to be a part of our partnership with our Shenandoah schools.
--Continue to build relationships with people, both near and far, who have a desire to support our schools and our community.
--Lastly, we have a well-connected foundation board. We all have a desire and passion to enhance opportunities for our students and teachers of our Shenandoah Community Schools. We will continue to find ways to build our endowment for generations to come in Shenandoah.
If you have had not had the opportunity to contribute to our foundation, I would encourage you to do so, and you can use the “DONATE” tab on this website for information on how to make your contributions. It will be greatly appreciated by everyone connected with our schools. Thank-you!
You can email the foundation president right here: Corby.Fichter@fcsamerica.com.