July 2019 – Newsletter

Well, summer vacation is almost over!!! We hope you all had a great time doing fun things, relaxing and getting ready to embrace the upcoming school year.

Empower and Excel had a very busy summer schedule with a variety of activities conducted during the summers along with our regular activities and few special events. It was very heartening to see so many E&E volunteers enthusiastically participating in various summer programs such as Robotics, Summer Reading and Learning Games, Family Library Night, Summer Camp and Jeena Academics Program for Special Needs Kids.

We also had a very productive session at JW House, a community home close to hospital for families going through medical crises. Our volunteers helped build a meditation garden and also cooked dinner for such families.

Inspired by Spoorthi’s Jagruthi project to teach self defense and sex education in India, few kids from Chennai decided to carry the torch forward and spread these teachings to low income community schools in Chennai. A girl named Smruthi translated the Jagruthi posters into Tamil. Special thanks to Vasu Madhav for connecting like minded people for a good cause.

Thank you very much to our team member Namrita Grover and her family for cooking a fresh and delicious lunch for our seniors at PriyaLiving. Thank you Geeta for taking the time to join and Madhavi for the sweet paan.

A few important updates before we dive into our July activities:

• 2019-2020 volunteer registration / renewals are around the corner. Please stay tuned for the updates.

• E&E is extremely happy to announce that we are now on Cisco’s list of approved organizations. Going forward we can take advantage of the matching program and volunteer hours that employees put in. Special thanks to Sai and Ravi for initiating this.

• E&E would like to see write-ups from our volunteers about their experiences and learnings. These will be included in the blog section of E&E website. The best ones will also be nominated at different places to feature your story. There is no big or small write-up. It is a freestyle blog writing. Volunteers can submit multiple write-ups. Please send your write-ups by 16 August 2019 to empowerandexcel.np@gmail.com

• Over the next 3-4 weeks E&E will be doing on-site photo shoots while volunteers are in action. So please wear your org T-shirts when volunteering. The best ones with ORG T-shirt ONLY will be included on the website. Special thanks to Ravinder Kumar for volunteering to capture these moments.

• E&E is going to do a website overhaul. We would like to hear your voices on features you would like to see. We will review them with the team.

• Salvation Army needs music instructors who can teach singing, guitar, piano, recorder, or drum line to youth in age group of 10-17. Classes run from 4:00 to 5:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays in San Jose. A three-month commitment is requested. Interested parties please reach out to Ayesha directly

• Note: From April 2019 onward, please enter your volunteering hours in the following google form. We no longer need to log in hours into the PVSA account. E&E will take care of it:
  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14aCCBe74pU2ZQP2gdxXMGD3m0-8tKklzazClDQaB2rA/edit

• We are very happy to let you know that we collectively dedicated a total of 402 hours to our community in July 2019. As always keep up the good work of volunteering to make our community a better place.

by: Tanisha Tol

Now for a sneak peek into our summer, regular and special activities for July 2019:

Serving at Shelters 

• 2019- Meal Sponsorship to AshaJyothi Handicapped Welfare Society: Very excited to announce our commencement with AshaJyothi and positively impacting the lives of these children through various activities. You can sponsor a meal at AshaJyoti to feed ~70 abandoned special needs children (autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, speech & hearing impaired, polio, down syndrome etc.). Various sponsorship options available such as: $200 for full day meals breakfast, lunch and dinner), $80 for just lunch or dinner, $45 for just breakfast. You can donate at https://empowerexcel.org/donate/ or you can mail the check or pay by cash.  Special thanks to our July Sponsors Families: Hiremath, Juluri, Sirineni, Kholi, Balla, Jaldu, Fotedar, Mullapudi, Chirala, Balabhadra, Chodavarapu
• Sunday Friends: Our volunteers managed tables for doing crafts and STEM-related experiments with kids from low-income communities

Special Events 

• Luncheon Party at Priya Living: Our seniors had a great time eating the delicious food cooked by Namrita Grover and family and spending time with our kid volunteers
• Spoorti’s Jagruthi Self Defence and Sex Education Program in India is being conducted by local Chennai volunteer Smruthi to spread awareness and knowledge among low income community schools in Chennai