#WhyWednesday
The end of the year is around the corner, and you’ll see #GivingTuesday on your social media platforms & inboxes. Every 501(c)(3) non-profit organization is developing, building, and launching their end of year fundraising plan, and we are no different — our goal is $25,000 by the end of the year!
However, as usual, we wanted to be a bit different than the norm. We are introducing a new hashtag: #WhyWednesday. Our #WhyWednesday campaign is an opportunity to share with you why we love what we do with high school students and why your giving makes a difference in the lives of the next generation of community changers.
#WhyWednesday – Our Current Impact
CYL is over 100 strong – meaning we have over 100 high schoolers from 26 different Denver Metro schools believing that young people can and will change their communities. Our mission is to develop young people’s leadership skills through our dynamic leadership process; to inspire a sense of adventure through meaningful service-learning opportunities in the local community; and to create community for young people to live out of their discovered skills and passions. We have struggled to truly document their community impact, and we know some volunteer hours have gone unrecorded due to low staff and high participation. However, we know for certain that to this date, our students have served a collective 2,940 service hours, helping over 25 local non-profits, and making a community impact of $73,794 according to the State Value for Volunteer Time. Over $70,000 community impact in our founding year, and our students haven’t even hosted their Turkey Bowls that benefit over 6 local non-profits, nor started their snowboard/ski service trips with adaptive non-profit programs across our Rocky Mountains! Over $70,000… and we are just asking for $25,000 to keep a good thing going…
#WhyWednesday – Our Future Impact
We want more! Follow this vision with us…
If we grow to 250 active students next year, with each student reaching their Democrat Summit, Colorado Young Leaders will have spent a total of 12,500 hours volunteering. How much economic impact is that in Colorado? $313,750!!!
How do we quickly scale CYL?
We’ve had many schools reach out to request the leadership curriculum materials needed to start volunteer & student-led school clubs. Each club has the potential to host 20 or more students.
We currently have two active student clubs & three more desiring to start at the beginning of the year.
We are confident in our ability to grow our current regional chapter and recruit five more schools. If we do so, we will easily meet our goal of 250 students.
What do we need this to happen?
A way to distribute curriculum to our students
A way to manage & track our students hours & summit achievements
A way for students to manage this involvement and create portfolios to show at the end of their time.
How do we do all this? An online student management platform that will help capture the impact of these incredible high schoolers.
This online student management platform will be an opportunity track volunteer hours, manage our student population, create accessibility to our leadership development for every member, allow schools to benefit from our leadership process and facilitate it among their local clubs, and much more. Here is the catch, we can not build this until it is fully funded. It’s a dream – our students want it, our schools want it, our parents want it – help make this a reality. Help tell our story of impact well.
You can be part of our growth in three ways:
1. Give to our End of Year Giving Campaign to raise $25,000.
2. Provide in-kind technical support for this development. Email us today.
3. Be our Caring Corporate Sponsor and fund this initiative. Email us today.