thankful thursday: part iii
part three of three: principal’s emergency fund
January is Thankuary, the final installment!
If you missed our e-newsletters the past two weeks, you may have also missed that we have deemed the month of January "Thankuary" -- to acknowledge the support from the kind and compassionate people in this community (like you!) who are empowering every student.
This week, we're focusing on how your support is helping ensure students' urgent basic needs are being met with both immediacy and benevolence through the Principal's Emergency Fund. Read more below about how your generosity is making it possible for students to:
stay in their homes or move into one; and
feel nourished when they don't have access to school-provided free breakfasts and lunches on weekends and during school breaks.
principal’s emergency fund
Your support provided grocery vouchers for the nearly 600 families of elementary students who meet the federal definition of poverty or are considered houseless. (In Olympia, at least one-third of students is eligible for free meals; at least 300 lack stable housing.) This allowed them to have fresh and nourishing food in their homes during the two-week winter break.
Helping students stay housed, avoid hunger
While the Principal's Emergency Fund (PEF) immediately provides students with urgent basic needs, such as clothing and shoes that keep them warm and dry, eyeglasses that allow them to read their school assignments, and toiletries that keep them clean, so far this school year the two most common PEF expenses are for housing -- either rental or move-in assistance -- and groceries.
Between inflation and the fact that the cost of living in Thurston County is at an all-time high, this shouldn't come as a surprise. And yet, we were not prepared for such a spike in requests for rental assistance and move-in expenses: Since the start of the school year, between September and December of 2023 alone, nearly $23,000, or 47 percent, of PEF funds have gone toward housing. By comparison, $24,000 of PEF funds went toward housing during the entire school year last year (between September 2022 and June 2023).
Which is all the more reason we are thankful for you!
Just since September, your support has provided rental assistance for 125 students -- helping them escape the trauma of being evicted from their home. What's more, because they were not displaced, these students can continue to thrive from the stability of attending the same school, learning from the same teacher, and being in the company of the same friends every day.
Grocery vouchers also continue to prove invaluable. They have accounted for nearly 20 percent of PEF expenses so far this year, and are up $3,000 more than they were last year at this time.
While schools were closed for the two-week winter break last month, your support provided grocery vouchers, redeemable at locally owned businesses like the Olympia Grocery Outlet, to 577 K-5 students, most of whom rely on free breakfasts and lunches to sustain them during the school week. Without you, they may not have had fresh food in their refrigerators for two weeks.
We also want to thank our friends at the Thurston County Food Bank and All Kids Win. Because of them, students left school for the break with non-perishable food items. Additionally, All Kids Win provided middle- and high-school students with grocery gift cards.
And we have to give a shout out to Help Us Move In for providing a $10,000 matching grant for rental assistance and move-in expenses -- stretching your support even further!
a housing success story
photo credit: austin dewees
Click on the image above to learn how your support helped this single mom and her daughter transition from couch-surfing to stable housing.
thank you, partners!
Thank you to the Thurston County Food Bank and All Kids Win for distributing non-perishable food items to students in need just before the start of the two-week winter break. All Kids Win also provided grocery gift cards to middle- and high-school students.
And one more shout out to Help Us Move in-thurston county for the $10,000 matching grant that is helping students stay in their homes -- and stretching your generosity even further.