op:coop

KapKa Cooperative School

http://www.kapkaschool.org

How do you come together and share a resource?

• We coordinate with the City of Seattle and the Ballard Food Bank to find folks who would go without a Thanksgiving meal without our support.

• Students, teachers and parents work together planning, shopping, cooking and delivering meals to ~50 people in need. While the adults are there to guide and mentor , the students take the lead on planning, shopping and cooking.
• The students work with the art teacher to create centerpieces and placemats. They write cards and poems in literacy class to tuck inside the delivery boxes that have been artfully decorated during their morning free time.
• Local businesses donate turkeys and food as well as gift cards to tuck into our delivery boxes.
• The children write thank you notes to all of the folks that help support our efforts.
• Our students’ relationship with the Thanksgiving recipients continues through the year with Valentine’s Day cards and correspondence. We have been delivering to some folks for over sixteen years and we are very fond of them and vice versa.

How would your group use the award money?

KapKa Cooperative School has been serving Seattle families for 21 years. Community service and environmental stewardship are important values for our KapKa families. Throughout the year we look for opportunities to reach out to our community and give back. KapKa would use the grant money to extend our curriculum and fund our service outreach projects.
Currently we use between $400 and $500 dollars of our curriculum money each year to pay for our Thanksgiving service project. With a portion of the grant money we could make sure that we are able to continue our Thanksgiving outreach during these tough economic times.
With the full grant we would be able to extend our salmon raising project. Currently we raise salmon that are released yearly in Fauntleroy Creek–collaborating with the West Seattle neighborhood group that cares for the watershed. Our stewardship in the watershed has drawn the recognition of the State of Washington Department of Ecology. We would like to have an opportunity to increase our understanding of how to help salmon and possibly extend our footprint into the area of caring for the Puget Sound watershed.
Our children take on a cause (or two) each year and do coin drives to make a difference. A few examples: Save the Manatees, Adopt a Zoo Animal, UNICEF Children’s Fund, The Heifer Project. It would be great to create a matching fund with a portion of the grant money.
Each Mother’s Day our school and alumni attend YMCA Camp Orkila. This past year Orkila asked us for support to help update their cabins. We were only able to scrape together a small donation. It would be great to have enough funds to give back to Camp Orkila in their mission of serving the youth of Puget Sound for over one hundred years.
In conclusion, you can see that we have a number of ideas for how to use the grant money. Many more than $5000 could possibly fund. Since it would be too big of a disappointment for the students to not get the grant, we have chosen not to mention this application to them. We are a Cooperative and that means that none of these possibilities will be finalized until we allow our children to have input about how they would like to spend the grant money.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to apply and allow us to dream big dreams.