Dear Acknowledge Alliance Family,
Happy New Year! Because July 1st marks the start of our fiscal year, it’s a great opportunity to take stock of all we’ve accomplished together.
Remarkably, Acknowledge Alliance will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2024! We are so honored to have been providing mental health services and resilience support to schools and community organizations for decades, reaching thousands of students and educators every year. Last year, youth in our Collaborative Counseling Program engaged in nearly 7,000 hours of counseling with our psychotherapists, a 10% increase from the prior year. This more frequent and extended timeframe of counseling led to students reporting decreases in depression and anxiety, fewer trauma-specific symptoms, deeper connections with their community, and stronger positive family and social relationships. Our Resilience Consultation Program served 645 educators, which was a 48% increase from the previous year. This means our resilience consultants helped more teachers and principals than ever before to feel healthy and empowered to address classroom challenges.
In May, we were thrilled to welcome everyone in the Acknowledge Alliance family to the relaunch of our annual Forget-Me-Not celebration, our first time holding the event in-person in 4 years. The room was filled with joyous energy from beginning to end. We had a wonderful time sharing our passion for the work we do, learning together about nurturing resilience in young people through an illuminating panel discussion, and honoring this year's outstanding educator honorees. We also played some spirited rounds of Connect Four and Jenga and created beautiful mandalas in our Art Therapy and Play Therapy Activity Zones. The lively return of events continued through June with our first board retreat in two years and our all-staff summer gathering. Both events helped to nurture connections among staff and board members, and allowed us to celebrate another successful year.
Behind the scenes, we continued to center diversity, equity, inclusion and justice (DEIJ) in our work because it directly complements Acknowledge Alliance’s guiding principles and agency values, especially in regards to the vital role relationships play in our strengths-based services. I firmly believe our agency must not approach DEIJ as just another “thing on our plate” - it IS the plate. DEIJ concepts must underpin all the important functions of our work, and we must implement them in a way that enhances our connections to the youth and teachers we serve, and model inclusive and equitable organizational policies and practices. With these goals in mind, the second iteration of the Acknowledge Alliance Inclusion Task Force, a staff-led working group charged with moving the needle on DEIJ at our agency, was able to accomplish so much in the last six months including:
Creating an agency equity statement
Organizing an arc of DEI learning concepts for all staff
Holding DEIJ facilitated workshops for the RCP, CCP and management teams
This year, I was honored to be selected to collaborate with two leading organizations on efforts to engage community leaders and drive capacity-building grant funding. First, I was selected once again to partner with BoardLead, a selective board-matching organization available to successful nonprofits at no cost through a competitive application process. I am grateful that our partnership with BoardLead resulted in matching with our two newest Board members, Cindy Goldman and Ankur Jain. Second, I again have the honor of participating in the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Steering Committee, a group of seven nonprofit leaders who help guide the design of their capacity-building grants program by providing insights and recommendations to CZI staff. The committee’s members help shape capacity-building activities so they will benefit the larger community of grantees, and serve as strategic advisors to help ensure that CZI’s funding efforts are anchored in the real experiences and needs of their grantees.
With the end of this fiscal year, we say farewell and express our deepest gratitude to Steve Hope, who is retiring from our Board of Directors after an extraordinary 9 years of service. Steve held many roles on the Board, including multiple terms as Board Chair. His commitment to the agency and leadership has been invaluable. Thank you, Steve, for helping to shape Acknowledge Alliance into the amazing organization that it is today.
As we look ahead to 2024 and Acknowledge Alliance’s 30th anniversary of nurturing resilience and building positive relationships between students and educators, I want to reiterate that we were only able to accomplish our goals thanks to the steadfast commitment of our community of supporters.
I look forward to celebrating the accomplishments of the last 30 years together and furthering our commitment to building thriving school communities for many years to come.
Sharon Navarro
Executive Director
P.S. What is your favorite Acknowledge Alliance memory from our last 30 years? I would love to hear from you, so please let me know!