Youth Community Service & Grants for Disadvantaged Youth
Youth Community Garden
We are almost 100% back! Quarter 3 has been very successful. We are now mentoring at 3 separate grade level schools in West Valley: Elementary,Junior High, and now High School! Our Junior High and High School groups are both at full capacity mentoring and we are loving it. They are doing great. Some of our high school students are having a bit of trouble adjusting to the high school culture. We are making an effort to teach the boys about time management. As we all know, the jump from junior high to high school is a big leap. We are truly believing in all of our high school boys and speaking into their success.
As the summer ended and the fall arrived, we had a great harvest of crops from our SOHY Community Garden. If you remember, last Spring the SOHY boys built a greenhouse and cultivated the land to begin our very first community garden. We had so many vegetables that we were able to distribute them to the SOHY families. Our families made salsa from the peppers and tomatoes and so much more. We are so blessed to be able to help our families and their communities from the hard work our boys put into the garden. We are excited for this coming spring so that the boys can tend the garden for an even bigger harvest next year! Through this sharing, it sparked a spirit of generosity in many of our young men. One in particular, his family owns chickens and he took it upon himself to share eggs with our group. We love seeing our youth begin to “get it” and give back to their community!
Once we have all of our students selected at the Elementary School, our High School students will begin helping us mentor there! It’s the beauty of this program. A step we’ve been eagerly awaiting. Our oldest students volunteer to mentor our youngest. They continue this journey of leadership and give back to the program that gave them so much. They also get hours in their portfolio.
This quarter we were able to have a hiking minicamp up Big Cottonwood Canyon. We had a blast hiking up the mountain. We were able to have great conversations along the way, about how their summers were going and reminisce about summer camp! The boys took turns leading the way up the trail. The boys endured and enjoyed a pretty tough hike and we made sure to have a lot of good laughs along the way.
We want to thank all of our grantors and donors. This third quarter was one of our most successful quarters in raising the funds to continue to bless the boys and their families. Without our donors, we would not be able to run our organization the way we do. We are extremely grateful for you and look forward to many years of partnering with you financially. We are looking forward to a wonderful 4th quarter ahead of us!