Support Youth & Families During the Pandemic

Our campaign for Give At Home MN will support our continued community outreach efforts in providing much needed, meals, basic supplies, and academic materials including laptops to children and families in need.

The coronavirus pandemic has deeply affected our youth and families. One of our core competences is addressing institutional barriers to success for our youth and families. A key component of that is providing nightly meals and transportation for the young people involved in our programs. Once the schools closed and eventually the shelter in place order, WE WIN had to cease our youth programming in mid-March.

It was then that WE WIN staff jumped into action to support the needs of the families. With schools and workplaces shut down, we saw an incredible void, the inability for our students and their families to be able to deal with the quarantine with the proper materials, from food and supplies to electronics.

FOOD AND ELECTRONICS

Since March 18th, we have coordinated the delivery of more than 10,000 pounds of food to 180 WE WIN families and community members in need. Along with the food, we've given 15 chrome books to WE WIN students who did not have a computer.

We partnered with Fishes & Loaves (a distributer of Second Harvest), Pillsbury House, the Racial Justice Network, and Birchwood Café; working collaboratively to ensure those who needed support the most received it. This has been an amazing time to test our charitable purpose.

FAMILY GARDENS

We are also hoping to create funding for our summer project Family Gardens. As we transition from in-person academic programming to new distant learning models, WE WIN has created a way for youth to keep learning while staying safe. During the summer months, WE WIN incorporates youth gardening into its existing enrichment programming. 

We are expanding the garden to include family members. Each family will receive a plot that will be tended by their household.

Funding will allow us to hire a Gardener to help us design a new model that gives families plots and creates distance.  We will also purchase compost, plants, seedlings, and support families with maintenance and harvesting of the produce.

LITERACY PROJECT

In partnership with Brightwater Montessori School and the Racial Justice Network, we are launching a literacy project: “We Win When We Read,” a reading project that teaches students in Kindergarten through Sixth grade about the greatness of Black people and our accomplishments.   We will demonstrate that students can learn about African Americans and address all the Minnesota State Standards.  With 4 out of 5 Black students in the Minneapolis Public Schools not at grade level in reading; this is a critically needed model for student success.

About WE WIN Institute

In 1996, WE WIN started with one program and 25 students. This began our mission of supporting the academic and social success of children. The work of WE WIN has flourished in an environment that has included many social and institutional barriers to achieving strong academic outcomes for those most marginalized among us. To date, we have engaged more than 5,000 young people supporting partnerships with 25 local organizations and larger public systems, responding to the social and educational environment for African American students using a culturally centered approach to engaging youth, families and communities. 

This means supporting the whole family, in the immediate, helping youth gain important academic and youth development skills through involvement in our programs, but also supporting parents in opportunities for engagement education advocacy, addressing systemic barriers, and basic needs. We’ve curated a consistent presence in education advocacy around the achievement gap and for resource allocation that is driven by the youth, family, and communities to create inclusion and an end to disparities. We take a similar relational approach to community partners, working together to leverage resources and ensuring that the largest impact is made. This has resulted in WE WIN becoming a trusted institution within the education and youth development community. All of these things engender WE WIN’s place within the social fabric of Minneapolis as an institution that can be relied on.