I recently came across a quote that seemed to eloquently summarize the experiences of this past year for me:
“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.” — Vince Lombardi
A little over a year ago, I personally was knocked to my knees when I learned of the passing of my friend, Eastside Pathways’ founder and first executive director, Bill Henningsgaard, his son Max, along with two young girls, Sade and Madisyn, in Connecticut. I know many can relate to this same feeling. For Eastside Pathways, to say that it was difficult to catch our breath and stand up is an understatement. However, in that difficult time, we in the partnership seemed to link arms and pull each other up.
We found our footing with each accomplishment: establishing a new backbone structure and budget, executing our first-ever attendance campaign, publishing the partnership’s baseline report to the community, hiring two full-time staff for the backbone, executing an awareness campaign on behalf of the partnership, expanding summer programs, continuing work on school readiness, establishing, and awarding the first grant from the Bill Henningsgaard Fund for Children, to name a few. These were all important steps in our comeback. The glory for me has been the opportunity to work alongside such a devoted board of directors, staff, corps of professional volunteers, and dedicated partner organizations intent on ensuring the success of each and every child from cradle to career.
The beginning of September marks the start of a new fiscal year for the backbone of Eastside Pathways. As we look toward the new fiscal year, we firmly embrace our defined values. In particular, by being adaptive, we will have a strong focus on organizational excellence and continuous improvement. We’ll remain firm on measuring and communicating progress and learning on behalf of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading as they are identified. We’ll further organize and define work designed to support youth from 4th grade up, and we’ll integrate community engagement practices to support each and every child in Bellevue so that all children have a culturally relevant connection to both school and community.
We’ll continue to refine how to best organize ourselves. We’ll shore up our own partnership structure, define and adopt decision-making and accountability practices, and hone our practices of welcoming and onboarding partner organizations so they immediately know where and how to contribute to the work and capacity of the partnership.
I am experienced enough to know that our partnership will likely feel more bumps and bruises in our future. I am now also confident that when we feel those knocks that as a partnership we’ll rise up and come back together… even stronger. Here’s to a new year!
Fondly,
Stephanie
Article written by Stephanie Cherrington, executive director of Eastside Pathways.