The past few days have been very successful in regards to making community connections. Frank and I dropped in at the office of Jerry Foster, the director of club sports on Monday and were received with lots of useful information, including an introduction to a few members of the Squashbusters staff. We hope to be able to partner with Squashbusters in the future as they are a great organization that was very open to working with the Y and talking with us! We left on Monday feeling accomplished, we felt we had made a great connection that would be lasting and beneficial to the youth we serve at the Wang, as well as the Hyde Park through Kristen and Aubrey.
Tuesday, all four YMCA-SIS co-ops set out to travel into BU territory to the office of Girls’ LEAP…as can be expected we were reminded of how much we love NU while watching the hordes of students walk up and down Comm. Ave. in the freezing cold. We were greeted at Girls’ LEAP by a friendly, all female staff, and Lola, the office dog (which of course we think should be an addition to the SIS office). Our meeting was successful and we found that SIS and Girls’ LEAP have many shared goals as both strive to create awareness surrounding issues of violence, especially violence perpetrated against women, in some capacity. We were all very impressed by the Girls’ LEAP program and feel it would be a great asset to the girls in our respective Y’s who we have found to be often disengaged and not as self-confident as we would like. Moving forward we hope to collaborate with Girls’ LEAP, and may even be able to bring them to the YMCA for Healthy Kids Day in May!
All in all we are making great progress in building community relationships and opening doors to the possibility of future partnerships and general awareness about SIS and the Wang/Hyde Park Ys. I am looking forward to more such meetings in the coming weeks as we begin implementing more concrete programs!
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