Help Cindy raise money

Once again, I am enthusiastically participating in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in support of Scientists in School. I hope that I can count on your support! 

As Scientists in School (and the world!) continues to recover from COVID-19, the importance of our mission and vision has never been more important in our 33-year history. Many children have learning gaps from being held hostage by the pandemic, society is polarized and divided, and climate change needs committed actions from each one of us. In fact, children can lead the way in their families, when equipped with knowledge and confidence! 

Transformation is not new in Scientists in School's three decade journey. However, it's pace has been remarkably different. None of us could ever have imagined how our organization would change our entire operating model to ensure our recovery from the massive challenges of the pandemic, which literally brought to a halt our opportunity to engage our typical 700,000 young scientists in 25,000 onsite, investigative workshops with shared materials and equipment. 

I am constantly in awe of the staff and presenter team I lead - one that would be the envy of any large-sized organization. It's a team that shifts the narrative to opportunity. It's a 'little engine that could' kind of team. Together their foresight and efforts created and scaled a new virtual workshop model, uniquely supported by a materials packing centre that has prepared and shipped over 400,000 topic-curated mini science materials bags over the pandemic for young scientists to use during workshops guided virtually by our scientists and STEM experts. The feedback from participating schools has been inspirational! We also leapt at the opportunity to use this virtual investigative model to reach a long-time dream and launched beyond Ontario and Alberta, to serve every province. This second workshop model, removes the travel barrier to sustainably serving schools in northern and rural communities. Over 1,500 of last year's 10,500 workshops were in new provinces, or new northern or rural communities, we previously could not serve.   

Now, fall 2022 is seeing schools and community youth groups begin to open up their doors to onsite workshops, and we are embarking on yet another transformative journey -  running both our former onsite classroom workshop model, concurrently with our investigative virtual workshop model. Our goals for instilling the values of science in our next generation, are lofty and important!

Our need for donations has honestly never been more important. As you can imagine, we still have big mountains to climb to regrow the financial resources and capacity needed to regain our pre-Covid financial resources, and to run both our  on-site and virtual workshop models, to engage young scientists and serve communities coast to coast. We are also striving to grow funds sizably for our Adopt-a-School initiative for schools serving low income communities, to ensure we embed this core tenet of proportional representation as we scale nationally. 

Let's dream big. Working together we will build critical pathways to bright futures for eager young scientists right across Canada. They are tomorrow's innovators, researchers, and thoughtful citizenry. Please help me exceed my fundraising goal of $3,000 by contributing to my fundraising page. 

Warmly, Cindy