Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 12: YouthCity Celebration

Today, I am grateful for my YouthCity team. One of our many grant requirements is to host a handful of parent nights throughout the year. We call them Celebrations and they are a tiny slice of after school magic. These simple events provide an opportunity for parents, kids, teachers and community members to gather and celebrate the projects, artistic creations, new skill sets, field trips, learning, growth and most importantly the friendship and community building connections that are the heart and soul of our programs. This simple and expected formula repeated session after session at site after site year after year measures both time and growth and tonight I was reminded just how important these events really are. Its the connections between kids and kids and between kids and staff and between the program as a whole to the parents and the community. We celebrate with lots and lots of kid friendly cheese and pepperoni pizza followed by a slide show or short kid produced movie. We celebrate with artwork and projects proudly displayed. We celebrate with music and or dance performances. We celebrate kids as individual contributors through campy silly and sometimes serious awards and the evening ends with gratitude for hard working kids, supportive parents and a big thankful shout out to our hard working staff. And weather permitting the grand finale is a kids vs adults sporting event and everyone goes home sweaty and happy often laughing and hugging and walking arm in arm. It's lots of work and its down right tear jerking for a sappy girl like me. I tear up ever darn time.

Tonight's celebration was super simple and yet a big big win for a new leader and his strong team. Always good to be reminded of the big and little wins hidden so carefully inside the day to day. YouthCity began somewhere around 19 years ago as a bold political promise to create something great for the youth of our community. In many ways, this whole crazy idea of a city run community based art infused technology supported after school programs placed in wonky neighborhood based buildings was a giant experiment and an incredible leap of faith and one I'm so very grateful to be a part. I consider myself lucky every day to be part of this magic and for all who've made it happen from one YouthCity Celebration to the next.