Thankful this Holiday Season

As I think about things I am thankful for this year, I am especially thankful for the community of supporters that surrounds Sunny Hills. This includes our wonderful donor community of foundations and individuals, all of the various referring agencies and other service providers who work in tandem with us, the staff who work with our kids each and every day, and of course those kids themselves; I am especially thankful for the youth that we serve, for their determination, their insightfulness, their willingness to keep trying in the face of some extraordinarily tough situations.

The staff and the young students at our Marin Academic Center (MAC) program are a wonderful example of what it is about Sunny Hills that we can all be thankful for. The students at MAC arrive on our San Anselmo campus from all over the Bay Area, having faced numerous challenges in their personal lives and along their educational paths. Most of them have specific learning challenges along with interpersonal challenges and issues. They are often confused, angry, alienated, and even terrified when it comes to school. Having bounced around from classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher, they have no solid adult or peer relationships to model their behavior on. Over and over again they have been told that they are failing, that something isn’t working, that maybe they should try somewhere else or something else.

But when they arrive at MAC, they are embraced whole-heartedly by every staff person they meet. And the other students around them, because of the constant reinforcement of their "community of caring," are able to provide positive peer support and interaction. For many of our MAC students, it is the first time that they have been able to call someone a friend. The small school environment, the 1:2 ratio of staff to students, and the constant positive reinforcement help children begin to learn and grow academically, in ways many of them never realized that they could.

What is it that makes MAC such a powerful example of success, community, and caring? MAC is a California certified nonpublic school serving children ages 5 to 15 whose educational and behavioral challenges are too acute to be handled in traditional public school environments. In practice, this means that MAC provides high-quality, individualized education that addresses each student’s particular needs. By building on each child’s personal interests and their fundamental desire to learn and grow, MAC sees extraordinary results where others have seen only escalating problems. Almost all MAC students are able to reach the goals of grade-level academic and social achievement, appropriate school behavior, and ultimately reintegration and mainstreaming back to their local schools or other less-restrictive educational settings.

This fall, we welcomed MAC to its permanent home on the Sunny Hills San Anselmo campus. We are happy to report that the staff, teachers, and kids are all doing well and loving their new environment! In addition to the updated buildings, swimming pool, and playground, plans are underway for a new edible organic garden in the spring, and kids and staff take advantage of the fields and open space that are now surrounding them. It is a wonderful, inspiring site for all of us.

A gentle reminder that this is also the time of year when we encourage people to pledge to the Sunny Hills annual appeal. Your pledge helps guarantee that programs like MAC continue to help vulnerable children learn, succeed, and grow academically and personally through caring and careful attention. Another way to support our programs and services is through purchase of a Bounty of Marin gift basket, which makes a lovely thank you gift or treat for someone special.

I wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and hope that like us here at Sunny Hills, you find much to be thankful for in your lives this year.

A Pledge of Support

The Sunny Hills Services Annual Appeal was sent out this week, and we are very excited to announce that our Board of Directors has pledged $50,000 in support to initiate this year’s fund! This extremely generous commitment by the board is a great kick-off to our campaign, and we hope it will inspire each member of the Sunny Hills community to make their own pledge of support for the vulnerable children we serve every day.

As we come to the end of the calendar year, we face a time when our need for private financial support at the agency is especially great. Long-standing programs like the Marin Academic Center need your help, as do new projects such as the parenting teen program and LGBTQ initiatives at BAYC. Our brand new programs, like Project PRIDE in Sonoma County, cannot get off the ground without private dollars to help them through their initial start up. And every day, we need your support to provide the treatment, the education, the emergency assistance, the advice, the medical care, the support, the person to talk to – whatever help it is that the young people in our programs need. That is our ongoing pledge of support to the vulnerable children and families that we serve, and we are able to keep that pledge with your help.

Our goal for the Annual Appeal this year is to raise $150,000 in gifts and pledges. This is an ambitious goal, especially in the face of the current economic situation, but we are expecting to reach it through small efforts from a large group of supporters. If each member of our donor community is able to make a pledge and commit to giving just $50.00 this year, we would have our most successful appeal on record! I hope you will consider making a gift or donation today. You can visit us online, or contact the Development Office at (415) 457-3200 x165 for more information. Every gift, pledge, and commitment helps.

Look for more program details here over the next few weeks, as we highlight some of the existing, expanding, and extraordinary programs and services that are made possible in part through funds from the annual appeal. And as always, thank you for being part of our Sunny Hills community; none of what we do would be possible without the tremendous pledge of commitment and ongoing support that we have from each of you.