Another Great Week!

Hello Everyone!

It's been a terrific week for the Community Connections program.

The Palo Alto Weekly did publish the story about our participants working at Menlo College. It was so fun to be in the news and see our participants in the spotlight. We are also planning on filming our next television program at the college as well.

We started a new partnership at the History Museum in Redwood City. We are working in the Marketing Department; helping with mailings, brochures and general PR. It's a wonderful partnership and our participants are learning a lot by working in a museum.

At the Community School of Music and Art we helped their staff get ready for the fall quarter. We cleaned the art rooms, washed the pottery wheels and helped separate all of the paint brushes. This is our third year helping out at the school.

We also started two new classes at CSMA. We are taking Marimba and Art classes and we love both of them. There will be an art reception in the spring to celebrate our work.

At the Marine Science Institute we helped prepare a mailing and cleaned the fish tanks. And at West Valley College we organized file cabinets, shredded office paper and put together binders.

It's been a great week; we had over 60 service hours in one week! Way to go!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Andrea

We're off to a great start!

Hello Everyone! And welcome to this week's edition of the Abilities United Community Connections Blog.

We are starting this week off on a great note. To begin with, our annual Abilities United Aquathon was held over the weekend and it was a huge success. Several Adult Day Participants and staff members swam in the event and we raised a lot of money. We are hoping to surpass our goals and will know the final numbers in a few days.

Today we started a new partnership at Menlo College in Menlo Park. Our group is working with Dining Services and we will be doing a variety of tasks. We help clean the tables, organize the salad and sandwich bars, clean the condiment table and anything else they need us to do. The Executive Chef and kitchen staff said they are so grateful for our help. The Palo Alto Weekly even sent a photographer to take pictures and interview our participants about their work. Hopefully they will publish our story in one of their upcoming newspapers. It was a wonderful way to start out!

We also returned to the Unitarian Church in Palo Alto. We help the administrative staff set up the church for sunday services.

At Haven House in Menlo Park we are working hard to organize their donation closets with toys, kitchen ware and clothing. It is fun to interact with all of the families that live there.

These are just a sampling of our activities; we will keep you posted on all of our activities over the next few months.

Thanks for reading!

Andrea

Welcome to September!

Hello and welcome to the Abilities United Community Connections blog!

I can't believe the summer is coming to a close and we are already into September! I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day.

Community Connections is really gearing up to have an incredibly busy fall quarter. We have set high expectations and goals and expect our program to really grow.

We have added five new partners over the past few weeks and will continue to increase our educational programs.

Two weeks ago we started our work at West Valley College in Saratoga. It is a great partnership. We travel to the college once a week and work in the Administrative offices on campus. We organize books, help with paper work and do whatever work that is asked of us. It is so exciting for our participants to be working on a college campus. Just watching us work is very inspiring.

Next week we will begin another partnership with Menlo College. We will be working in the dining hall which should be a lot of fun.

At the beginning of September we celebrated our one year anniversary of working at the East Palo Alto YMCA. We have accomplished so much at this site. Their facilities manager said the Y has never looked so good!

Several of our participants are also planning on attending the Abilities United Aquathon on Sept 11. We hope to raise even more money than last year.

Whew...we are really growing! Next week promises to be even busier so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Andrea