While there has been a lot of growing excitement around The Magnolia Mother’s Trust and some of Springboard’s newer initiatives, we recognize that at our heart, we are a resident service provider committed to helping families in low-income housing reach their goals in life, work, and school. It’s hard to believe, but Springboard has been in existence for 6 years now and those 6 years have been filled with growth, new developments, and many lessons learned.
In light of all of this, we have spent the last few months creating a strategic plan for the next 5 years, ensuring that each community where we provide services is complete with strong, innovative, wrap-around supports for families that serve as springboards to their goals. While we’ve expanded our reach quite a bit in recent years, our hope right now is to dive deeper in the places where we already are.
We have supported kids through elementary afterschool programs and middle school empowerment programs and now it is time to make sure we’re offering programs for high school students that provide safe spaces after school, help them apply for college, and support them as they begin to explore careers and make plans for their adult lives. We want to ensure that the programs we have are supporting families at critical junctures in their education, like being prepared for kindergarten, passing third grade, not falling behind in middle school, and being on track to graduate high school on time.
We have learned how important financial security and empowerment programs are and want to expand efforts around Children’s Savings Accounts and workforce development programs into all of our communities. We want to renew and expand our programs around self-image and leadership development, as we recognize so many of our families have internalized the hurtful and patronizing narratives our culture has told, particularly around women of color trapped in poverty. And we want to find ways to empower our residents to advocate for themselves and their families in their schools, communities, or wherever they find themselves knowing their voice has worth and dignity and needs to be heard.
While we’d love to go into details about every program and support we provide, we also know you’d probably rather not read a newsletter that is 20 pages long. Instead, we hope you’ll take some time to look at the graphic below and see just a small glimpse of what it looks like for us to provide holistic, family services in each of our communities.