You’re invited to be a “Part of the Promise” this year, as we collectively work improve the lives of our students.

It’s easy. Just donate to a cause in the Mission in lieu of purchasing gifts, or ask your friends and family to make your holiday gift a tax-deductible donation.

There are many impactful Mission-based organizations providing access to critical services and information for families, and public schools serving as bilingual hubs for the community.

Immediate classroom and school needs
If you’re interested in directly donating to a classroom or school, we are excited to announce a few ways that you can support Mission students to close out the year.

Various projects are up on Donors Choose — a website that allow you to enhance the everyday learning experience for our Mission students by funding specific projects. Donations, of all sizes, help teachers get the supplies they need for the upcoming second semester.

Here’s a list so that you can find a project that taps into your educational passion and meets a community need.

Elementary School Projects

Secondary School Projects

*these projects expire before Jan. 1

A little or a lot. Give your time. Gain a community.
Prefer to donate your time as you get more involved in the community in the New Year? Resolve to help students reach their learning goals next semester.

At Cesar Chavez Elementary School, located at Shotwell and 23rd streets, Reading Partners will train you on building specific literacy skills and pair you up with a student to read with each week. Sam and Megan did so and changed their own perspective as a neighbor, while providing invaluable support to accelerate a student’s learning. Join our team! Take a few minutes to sign up for a training so that you can get started when students return from the winter break.

Alternatively, the San Francisco Education Fund clears volunteers to get involved at Everett Middle School and O’Connell High School. There are top-priority opportunities to support students’ growth in math at both schools — especially Algebra for high school freshmen. Get started by attending an orientation in person or online, and give yourself a few weeks to brush up on your math skills before getting in the classroom.

For more information about how you can support the academic success of our students in the Mission District, contact the Mission Promise Neighborhood: (866) 379-7758; info@missionpromise.org.

Welcome to the community, and thank you for being “Part of the Promise!”

____________________________________________________________

About Mission Promise Neighborhood

The Mission Promise Neighborhood is a citywide community partnership that was created to support kids and families living, working and attending school in the Mission District. It brings together schools, colleges, community organizations and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability.

Read More

Interview with: Jassy Grewal
Program: Early Learning

Why did you decide to volunteer with the Mission Promise Neighborhood?
I decided to volunteer with Mission Promise Neighborhood through LEE’s Summer Policy and Advocacy Fellowship. I chose to work with Mission Promise Neighborhood because I wanted to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the education system in San Francisco after finishing my first year of teaching in a middle school. I really wanted to work with the Early Learning issues because I wanted that hands-on experience to start to understand why the majority of my students were entering middle school with large math and literacy gaps.

What projects have you worked on as a volunteer for the Mission Promise Neighborhood?
As a volunteer, I have worked on several projects with Early Learning. The project that stands out to me the most would be redesigning the Early Learning Framework to help inform and build alignment across all partners on what our goals are for the Mission District. This framework will be used by Mission Promise Neighborhood partners to begin discussing solutions around some of the problems that the Mission faces, such as infant-toddler slots, early learning program subsidies and critical transitions from preschool to kindergarten.

What do you like best about volunteering with Mission Promise Neighborhood?
I really enjoyed my time working with the Mission Promise Neighborhood this summer; the individuals and their passion for improving educational inequality in the Mission District of San Francisco really helped to make this an unforgettable experience.

What have you learned from your volunteer experience?
I have been able to learn more about the Mission District and the struggles that our youngest students and their families face on a day-to-day basis. I have been able to gain a more in-depth knowledge around the problems the Early Learning community faces and how to address those problems through policy and advocacy work.

Tell us something we may not know about you. Any interesting facts you’d like to share about your life?
I found my way into education issues and policy because I was also a first-generation English language learner. My family and I had a hard time navigating the education system in California and were really thankful for family, friends, and amazing teachers who were able to offer us assistance and resources. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school and college in the United States, and I hope one day to improve the education system for children like me so that they are able to access the resources and experiences I was able to growing up.

When I am not working on education issues, I enjoy spending my time traveling and hiking with family and friends. I have been to three different continents and hope to one day be able to travel to all seven. I am a huge elephant enthusiast and am currently planning my next trip to volunteer at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand.

____________________________________________________________

About Mission Promise Neighborhood

The Mission Promise Neighborhood is a citywide community partnership that was created to support kids and families living, working and attending school in the Mission District. It brings together schools, colleges, community organizations and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability.

Read More

Pokémon Go has taken off, with its popularity reaching a fevered pitch when it debuted in Japan on Wednesday. The growth of this location-based, augmented-reality mobile game shows no sign of letting up.

With Friday being InDay for LinkedIn employees, they chose to forego this trend and do it old style via a scavenger hunt, also a race.

InDay (short for Investment Day) is time LinkedIn gives its staff to invest in themselves and their communities — a time for connection, collaboration and co-creation. The focus of July’s InDay is culture, deemed an integral part of the company; the goal is for employees to teach each other about their communities, thereby encouraging an inclusive environment.

With culture as the centerpiece of today’s event, it made sense for the company’s Hispanics Of LinkedIn Alliance (HOLA) to participate. The mission of HOLA is “to build and empower the Latino community, by fostering and maintaining an inclusive, supportive and culturally competent environment, while upholding the mission and values of LinkedIn and increasing brand equity.”

Coming by the Mission Promise Neighborhood offices served a twofold purpose for these teams that totaled 60 LinkedIn staff.

First was to learn about the impactful work of this education initiative, and how LinkedIn employees could help by becoming volunteers.

The second reason for coming by was to drop off 25 supply-filled backpacks that will be given to habitually underresourced families at the Mission Promise Neighborhood Education Forum 2016, slated for Saturday, July 30 at City College San Francisco – Mission Campus. LinkedIn is a sponsor of this community event.

At this important back-to-school day, families will be taught immigrant, worker and housing rights, plus be given early learning and special-needs student resources. There will also be instruction on how to create a college-going culture at home.

States Volunteer Services Manager Lucia Obregon of the importance of Mission Promise Neighborhood being part of today’s event, “LinkedIn has become one of our closest partners, and they are always looking for creative ways to keep their staff engaged in the community. I am glad that, once again, they thought to include us in their InDay activity. This scavenger hunt is another opportunity for us to expose LinkedIn staff/tech workers not only to the Mission neighborhood, but the various ways they can get involved with the Mission Promise Neighborhood.”

____________________________________________________________

About Mission Promise Neighborhood

The Mission Promise Neighborhood is a citywide community partnership that was created to support kids and families living, working and attending school in the Mission District. It brings together schools, colleges, community organizations and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability.

Read More

Socially driven visual designer Megan Malley has spent time volunteering across the globe. The Seattle native has landed on six continents, always donating her skills and time. Volunteer highlights include being a photographer with an artisan textile organization in the Peruvian Andes (photo), conducting design research on xenophobia and AIDS in South Africa, and working as a fair-trade product designer in Nepal.

Heading closer to home two years ago, Megan landed in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, one of the newer parts of town down by the ballpark. Megan immediately felt at home as she explored the unique neighborhoods of the city, including the culturally rich Mission District.

“Since moving to San Francisco, I have felt so welcomed into my new city by everyone I meet. I love the sense of community here, and the way that nobody is viewed as an outsider, even if they haven’t been around very long. It’s a city made from a patchwork of varied personal histories, which makes it a vibrant and diverse place to live,” explains Megan of her ardor for her adopted hometown.

With volunteering in her DNA, Megan sought a place to give back. She first heard about the Mission Promise Neighborhood at an annual pro-bono design conference that she attends, where visual designers donate two days of their time to work on collateral for nonprofit organizations. Last February, Megan’s team designed infographics, a website and a motiongraphic, all to refresh the Mission Promise Neighborhood brand’s visual identity.

Over the course of that weekend, Megan heard of the impactful work the Mission Promise Neighborhood was doing with the community to better the educational opportunities and lives of underresourced families.

The tutoring programs especially struck a chord with Megan. She immediately wanted to get involved.

That involvement comes via Reading Partners, a national nonprofit dedicated to transforming struggling young students into confident readers. The organization creates an on-site reading center at each school they serve, including Cesar Chavez Elementary in the Mission Promise Neighborhood. Room 24 now teems with engaging books for kindergarteners to 4th-graders, creating an idyllic atmosphere for one-on-one learning opportunities at an accelerated pace to get back on grade level in reading.

Megan meets up with student Jeremiah each week for an hour. For most of the kids at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, English is not the primary language spoken at home. When they read with a native speaker, the student hears the patterns and nuances of fluent reading, which helps them gain confidence in their own reading.

Megan knows that the experience is just as beneficial for her as it is for Jeremiah: “By tutoring I get to spend time with kids, which I love, and I also get to share my enthusiasm for reading. As a child, I would spend hours lost in books, and it makes me so happy to be able to encourage a youngster to feel the same way about reading.”

By returning weekly to read with the same student, Megan sees him gaining comprehension skills, recalling phonics and word patterns from past sessions.

“It’s so rewarding – for both of us – to see progress happening at such a consistent pace. I would encourage anyone who enjoys working with children to volunteer,” Megan explains. “It’s such a small time commitment, as little as one hour per week, but makes such a huge difference for the students. I’ve loved my time reading with Jeremiah – and I really look forward to our sessions every week.”

____________________________________________________________

A little or a lot. Give your time. Gain a community.

Volunteer today with the Mission Promise Neighborhood!

____________________________________________________________

About Mission Promise Neighborhood

The Mission Promise Neighborhood is a citywide community partnership that was created to support kids and families living, working and attending school in the Mission District. It brings together schools, colleges, community organizations and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability.

 

 

Read More

“As a newcomer to the Mission, I want to know my neighbors and be part of a community,” states Sam Cooper, a friendly, engaged volunteer at Mission Promise Neighborhood’s Cesar Chavez Elementary School. That’s where Sam takes time out of his busy schedule twice a week to read for an hour to kindergartner Jasline – opening a new door to success for the youngster’s life.

Sam grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, New York. The adventurous young man headed overseas after college to Taiwan’s capital of Taipei, where he taught English to U.S.-bound high school students. Last October, Sam landed in the Mission. Joining Sam was his girlfriend and a roommate, the trio sharing a flat near the 24th Street BART station, with a vibrant neighborhood to explore right outside the door.

Sam immediately felt at home, but longed to feel more connected to his adopted community.

That’s when an Internet search found the answer to making that a reality.

“I had recently scaled down my job to have more time for entrepreneurial and political pursuits. I also wanted get to know my new community. While I was figuring out how to get involved, I watched an interview with Killer Mike, the rapper and activist, who made a compelling case for one-on-one tutoring and mentoring. When I found the Mission Promise Neighborhood website, it looked like a great organization. They made it very easy to get involved,” explains Sam.

That involvement comes via Reading Partners, a national nonprofit dedicated to transforming struggling young students into confident readers. The organization creates an on-site reading center at each school they serve. In Cesar Chavez Elementary’s case, that setup is in Room 24. This classroom now teems with engaging books for kindergarteners to 4th-graders, creating an idyllic atmosphere for one-on-one learning opportunities at an accelerated pace to get back on grade level in reading.

Sam’s is the quintessential volunteer experience. He gets to spend time with a wonderful kid and shares in her excitement at learning. Working with an elementary student is new for Sam – with an entirely different set of challenges from his professional life as a self-employed private instructor for high schoolers – but he believes the additional perspective has made him a better teacher for his older students as well.

The great news is that Jasline has made significant progress reading and writing new letters, recognizing common words, understanding syllables and how to count the syllables in a word, learning how to rhyme and sounding out words. In addition to these concrete skills, Jasline now exhibits enthusiasm for reading, more often requesting to read out loud instead of Sam taking the active role.

That’s true impact via one community member’s volunteerism.

“I am honored to give back to the Mission community. It’s the right thing to do,” sums up Sam of his volunteer experience for Mission Promise Neighborhood.

____________________________________________________________

A little or a lot. Give your time. Gain a community.

Volunteer today with the Mission Promise Neighborhood!

____________________________________________________________

About Mission Promise Neighborhood
The Mission Promise Neighborhood is a citywide community partnership that was created to support kids and families living, working and attending school in the Mission District. It brings together schools, colleges, community organizations and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability.

 

Read More

MONTHLY ARCHIVE

Contact

Email
info@missionpromise.org
 
Phone
(415) 569-2699
 
Address
2301 Mission Street, Suite 304
San Francisco, CA 94110

Newsletter
Get the latest news and information on
what’s happening in your neighborhood.

SIGN UP