Tag: support

#ThrowbackThursday! KFair Mentoring Tip #2: Giving Thanks

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For #ThrowbackThursday, we are going all the way back to 2014 when this post was first published! Even 3 years later, this information is still useful to entrepreneurs, non-profit administrators, or anyone else in leadership positions. And it preps us up for #GivingTuesday on November 28!

This is the second KFair Mentoring Tip in a series of monthly insights to provide guidance and encouragement for Give-thanks1mentors and entrepreneurs. November’s theme is giving and showing thanks! For this month’s, KFair Mentoring Tip, we will be sharing Polished Pebble’s way of thanking sponsors and other contributors.

Organizations and businesses, either for-profit or not-for-profit, all benefit from their generous supporters. Their acts of kindness and support help us maintain our goals and move towards a bright future. So, how do we properly show our gratitude?

Kelly Fair has five steps for an effective and personal appreciation:

  1. Identify the sponsors, contributors, and all-around do-gooders for your organization
  2. Measure their contribution and its outcome
  3. Plan an appropriate strategy for showing thanks
  4. Personalize the gift, letter, email, blurb, etc.
  5. Send!

When you try and identify your contributors, don’t only focus on the large funders or corporations. Individuals and smaller community organizations are also deserving of our gratitude! However, the larger corporation can be a little trickier when it comes to acknowledgements. The corporation that opened their office and staff for a tour and workshop will require different recognition than an individual volunteer. The corporation would benefit from, and appreciate more, a public acknowledgement through social media or other venues. The best way to learn how to acknowledge your corporate sponsor is by asking! They might have preferences in logos, branding, or even what they are able to accept. Asking will help you avoid awkward situations.

For example, this week Polished Pebbles partnered with ThoughtWorks Inc. to showcase jobs in technology to our girls. Polished Pebbles then posted pictures to Facebook with a thank you and shout-out, and wrote a blurb in our weekly newsletter.

Polished Pebbles girls with ThoughtWorks staff from their visit last week. Pictures like these are an easy way to personalize a thank-you or use on public venues. This was posted on our Facebook page.

Personalizing the acknowledgement is the perfect way to be memorable and maintain a positive relationship! On past occasions, Polished Pebbles has sent signed shirts from the program girls to the sponsor, or even an album of photos. These small gestures show that time was taken to appreciate their contribution. This doesn’t mean you have to do-away with the generic letter or email, just spice it up a bit with photos or personal quotes from staff, volunteers, or participants.

Check out these examples for inspiration:

  • Signed organization t-shirt
  • Signed photo and frame
  • Public newsletter or social media blurb with shout-out
  • Video with staff, volunteers, or participants showing off donated items or giving thanks
  • Invite sponsors, donors, contributors to events
  • Public acknowledgement in a speech or publication
  • Thank-you party for all volunteers or staff
  • Public “Partners” page on your website

Don’t forget to show your gratitude this Thanksgiving season!

If you aren’t receiving newsletters from Polished Pebbles, and would like to, email [email protected]!

Wishing You Happy Holidays

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Another year has come and gone and we are once again saying, “Happy Holidays”! We hope you spend this day with those who matter most and appreciate the love that you share. Here at Polished Pebbles and KellyFairtheMentor we know that we love and appreciate all of you!

As you get those last gifts wrapped, don’t forget your community mentoring program. Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program strives to be a positive force in your community–with your support! To leave us a beautiful wrapped present (bow included), click here…

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A Day of Generosity: #GivingTuesday

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Today is the day we give thanks. We express our gratitude to family, friends, mentors, role models, and even local organizations striving to better their community.

This Thanksgiving, Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program has a message for our supporters:

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It is because of your generosity and love that we are able to keep doing what we’re doing…supporting your girls! We love being a positive influence in our community. Our Pebbles are growing up to be accomplished, successful young women and we could not be more proud!

You are the force that keeps Polished Pebbles moving forward. And we want you to know how to keep being a positive influence in your community. We are asking you to be a part of #GivingTuesday.

What is #GivingTuesday?

We have a day for giving thanks. We have two for getting deals. Now, we have #GivingTuesday, a global day dedicated to giving back. On Tuesday, December 1, 2015, charities, families, businesses, community centers, and students around the world will come together for one common purpose: to celebrate generosity and to give.

It’s a simple idea. Just find a way for your family, your community, your company or your organization to come together to give something more.

If you want to join the movement, consider joining Polished Pebble’s Monthly Giving Program. Learn more about Monthly Giving here…

If you aren’t able to contribute a monetarily, consider donating your time, commitment, and love! We are always looking for volunteers for our program! Learn more at our website…

For today, enjoy your turkey!

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5 Reasons Why You Support Polished Pebbles

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For the month of September, we encouraged you to donate to Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program. And we want to say, “THANK YOU!” It is because of supporters like you that we are able to provide our girls with enriching learning activities. While people have donated to Polished Pebbles for various reasons, we have here our top five reasons to support girls in your community:

12063808_1149618335051766_9053906914125295027_nSelf Image. Young girls are constantly bombarded with not-so-positive images of black women. This causes stereotypes and caricatures to become false realities they might try and emulate. The angry black woman, oversexed backup dancer, gold-digger, and baby mama are not the only images that should be present in the general media. But it can seem that they are. Mentoring not only shatters these false images by providing positive alternatives, but it teaches girls another way to think of themselves. Mentoring programs and relationships can help to spread the “body positive” and “natural hair” movements. While curly is not better than straight and curvy is not better than thin, it gives girls the ability to choose! They are exposed to all of the possibilities, all of the many ways to love themselves.

Educational Achievement. A successful mentoring program and mentoring relationship will bring out the best in your girls. It will encourage and support them as they move through the world. In a previous blog post on KellyFairtheMentor.com, Kelly Fair shared an article by Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu, “Have Black Girls Been Overlooked?” from the “Black Star Journal”. She brings to our attention the lack of attention paid to black girls in education. We focus on black boys, their dropout rates and the school to prison pipeline. We tend to forget that black girls are in the same vicious cycle. According to the article, 12% of black girls are suspended from school and 40% are dropping out! Mentoring programs bring the necessary attention to black girls so that they don’t get left behind in school. We want all our girls to recognize their intelligence and strive for academic success. Let’s ensure that black girls are no longer overlooked!

Female Social Support. Growing up I remember my mother telling me that girls are mean to each other. Instead of banding together in camaraderie, girls are competing with one another for beauty, love, and acknowledgement. While not always the case, this conflict is noticeable during school years. This war between women hinders our ability to develop positive female relationships; who could be our possible sisters in arms as we combat these obstacles. Girls focused mentoring programs break down these competitive natures to help develop lasting, supporting relationships. This will become the cornerstone to future relationships your girls will make in life. They will learn to see one another as a teammate, a co-worker, a mentor, and a friend. 11540921_1098960880117512_8265015966029465418_n

Life Skills. Mentoring programs focus on different points of intervention. Some programs target relationship building and others target studying habits. Polished Pebbles, as you may know, focuses on developing communication skills to positive, respectful interactions with peers and adults. While you may not think your daughter is lacking in any of these skills, it never hurts to get a little extra practice. Plus, these are all real and useable skills! Mentoring programs prepare young girls for adult life by teaching them how to effectively be a grown-up. Do you think you came out of the womb ready to manage finances or mediate conflict? No, someone taught you! 

This Pebble. When asked about how she has benefited from the Polished Pebbles program, this young pebble perfectly replied: “Being dedicated. When I give my word, I want to be there. Being there for your sister. I can call all these young ladies my sisters because of the bond we have right now.” We want all young black girls out there to feel this way about their peers, their sisters! She sums out all of the reasons why mentoring is necessary for young black girls!

We hope that these five reasons inspire you to get your girls involved in a mentoring program! As human beings with knowledge and caring hearts, we can join together to ensure a positive future for black girls. As Polished Pebbles says, Together She Will Shine!

To make a one-time donation or join our monthly giving program, click here…

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Let Your Light Shine!

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On September 17, 2015 we will be honoring our awardees and supporting Polished Pebbles Girls Mentoring Program at the Together She Will Shine Reception. If you have yet to RSVP for the event, click here to get your ticket. On this day, we take time to recognize the other side of the crisis; the obstacles that stand in the way of our black girls. We recognize the work that Polished Pebbles and our awardees have done to help clear the path to success for them.

A note from our founder, Kelly Fair:

Six years ago after leaving my corporate job, I sought to fill a void and keep a girls group mentoring program going in my community just like my mentor Rev. Dr. Linda Shepherd taught me right before her sudden death. I didn’t have huge plans for the organization to be much more than a monthly place where girls and women could come together and grow personally and professionally, collectively. Since that time, we have grown from serving two girls to well over 1200 in 40 different program sites. That’s all due to family, friends, volunteers, staff, and community members who have supported our work from the start. So often, people approach this work focused on what they want to impart upon young or the needy. But, my philosophy has always been “we are drawn to this work”, not always because of what we think we have to give, but instead we are in fact the very ones in need of the most love, and growth. My confidence, self worth, skill, ability to love others unconditionally, and wisdom grows daily because of my involvement in Polished Pebbles. Join me to celebrate 6 years of our growth as a community, and the altitudes we’ll go in six more years!

Here’s an idea of how YOUR support will help to create successful futures for our young girls…

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#WhatSheNeeds: Parental Support

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#WhatSheNeeds will provide insights into the experiences of black women in college. From the freshman transition to the affects of social media, these women have a lot to say! Black women are out enrolling every other group in college, but not experiencing the same high levels of success 4 years later in their careers. Through #WhatSheNeeds, we hope to learn a little more about what she needs to succeed–what did their institutions have and what were they lacking?

9f7c22d95fc8216af3dc1c340fa76760#WhatSheNeeds continues with our first topic…Parental Support! For all of our interviewees, parents have been incredible supports during the college experience. But sometimes, things got a little sticky. Parents always wants what is best for their children, but sometimes this causes tension for college students. As summer is quickly passing, all you parents are getting ready to send your daughters off to college–some for the first time! We want you to know how to best support your daughters in their academic career! Here is some advice from our lovely college women…

Anessa Trask said in her interview, “Your parent’s dream career for you, may not be YOUR dream career for you.”

This is exactly what Sadariah experienced…

Sadariah Harrel is majoring in Business Management, but her dream lies in the arts:

“I’m not in school for what I want to be in school for. Me, I’m more of the creative type; I’m more of the art time. I love to write…Anything that deals with my imagination, I love to do it. And I feel like it’s such a big thing in society being an African American female, being a female period. Its like you have to be in a field where it’s like business or computer science just so you can be competitive because you are a female. And my mother she’s a computer analyst so she’s like,  “You have to do that, you have to do this.” And I’m like “No, I love English and I love reading and I want to write”. And she’s like “No. If I’m paying then you’re going for what i want you to go for”…I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. It wasn’t fun for me. It felt like I was being forced to do something.”

On the other hand, is Sydney Tyler:

“My family supports my major 100%. A lot of my family is health professionals, so it was pretty normal when I told them I was going into the health field. They’re loving it”

This isn’t to say one family is better or more supportive than another, but parenting style does affect the college experience. It can either drive a woman to success or make her feel a little lackluster about her future.

But don’t pity Sadariah. While pursuing her business major, she knows she can express her creativity in other ways. As she told me, “I can always publish books on the side”.

Mostly, these women just want to make their families proud:proud-to-be-the-first-blog-header

“I am first generation in my family. I am the only child of a single parent. It was my first college experience with applying to colleges and getting into college. And I did it. All with the support of my mom, and it was a wonderful experience.” –Sydney Tyler

“I’m the first to go so far away. I’m far away from my family. I’m out there on my own. I’m the first person to go to an HBCU, the first person to pledge a sorority, the first person to become a nursing major. Sometimes I feel a lot of pressure because I am doing so many firsts! And I don’t want to let anyone down, or disappoint anybody. So, I’m kind of harder on myself.” –Jasmine Hosley

“Throughout my entire life I kind of felt the most pressure because I’m the only child. I’ve always been, like the ‘brain’. My cousins would always call me that and say I was a nerd. And so, I always felt like I had to live up to that, you know, title of what was given to me. Because I knew, like, no one else was fitting that at the time” –Brittany Colvin

Terri Floyd summed up the role of the parent perfectly:

“I had my family, my parents are encouragers.”

To all you parents out there with daughters headed off to college, “Be encouragers!” Your daughters want and need your support for a successful college transition and experience. Remember, you both have the same priority; to succeed! 

Investing in the Future of Black Girls

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As many of you know, Kelly Fair was an ambassador for the Chicago Community Trust at the On the Table Discussion Tuesday evening. We had our discussion with a diverse group of people from community service members (social workers, school counselors, etc), teachers, businessmen, and even officers of the court. She lead her topic, Investing in the Future of Black Girls, with inspiring community leaders to teach them that everyday citizens are agents of change. Kelly Fair has often focused “on the other side of the crisis”. Black girls are living and developing in the same communities as black boys, yet they do not receive as much attention. Their fight is an invisible one. Polished Pebbles, Kelly Fair, and On the Table 2015 brought a voice to that struggle.

This year, Kimberlé Crenshaw released a report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected. According to Crenshaw:

Ideally, the conversation Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected engenders within communities and among philanthropists, policy makers, stakeholders, and advocates will lead to the inclusion of girls in efforts to address school discipline, push-out, and the pathways to incarceration, poverty, and low-wage work. We are especially hopeful that ongoing efforts to resolve the crisis facing boys of color will open up opportunities to examine the challenges facing their female counterparts.

Crenshaw and Kelly Fair agree on multiple points. Like Crenshaw, Fair believes more research, media, and communities need to focus on young, African-American women. From sex trafficking to school discipline, our girls are in danger in their very communities. As local community leaders, you are able to make changes, to be a voice for this invisible fight! We want to empower you to stand up for your community, for your young, black girls. For all of those who already have, thank you for your courage, for all of those who have yet to do so, thank you for reading our message. We want to continue our discussions! Comment, share, and spark conversation with those around you. Because together she will shine!

From Polished Pebbles and Kelly Fair, thank you to all who attended Polished Pebbles facilitated On the Table discussion. We appreciate your voice, heart, and presence. Thank you to Chicago Community Trust for allowing us to share this conversation with our community.

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

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Last week we shared with you amazing insights from L’Oreal Thompson Payton. In one of her ilovehumanityresponses, L’Oreal shares the definition of philanthropy as “love of humanity”. To close our April theme of Philanthropy and Giving, I want to delve into this definition. When we think about donating money, time, and resources, what does love got to do with it?

Valaida Fullwood, from Black and Brown News, proposes in her article, Love Of Humanity: Let’s Radically Engage In Reclaiming The Root Of Philanthropy, that philanthropy (and love) are inherent in Black America. She writes:

Indignities, inequities and injustices do not simply dissipate; instead, we must come together in systematically uprooting them – the needs are great and the need for unity greater.  The times beckon a new era of conscientious philanthropy, rooted in a love for community and expectations of social change. Let this generation, both young and old, embody a social transformation with bold recognition of our power and responsibility to give back.

Black America faces many challenges, not just in daily life but also from large institutions in this country. Fullwood suggests that by loving Black America, we can create sustainable change. An extension of that love is philanthropic giving. If we want to see change, we have to support that change! This radical redefining of philanthropy might change the way you think of giving. Philanthropy is not a single, begrudging act, it is an expression of self, a way of life. Instead of engaging in philanthropy. Be philanthropic. Be love. If philanthropy only takes love, then we all have a little to give.

Let’s reclaim the definition of philanthropy. Let’s love our humanity. Let’s love Black America.

Money CAN Buy Happiness

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Recently on Polished Pebbles, we have been sharing with you our Monthly Giving Program. It is an opportunity to support our Girls Mentoring Program by providing resources for our girls–journals, sweaters, transportation, and job shadowing experiences. We advertise that through this Giving Program you can support our young women for less than a cup of coffee a day! Now, this isn’t done to guilt any one of you (that’s the last thing we want our supporters to feel). We just want you to know that it doesn’t take big contributions to support us or our girls. Every cent counts and every cent can affect your happiness!

People who spent money on other people got happier. People who spent money on themselves, nothing happened. It didn’t make them less happy, it just didn’t do much for them. And the other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn’t matter that much. So people thought that 20 dollars would be way better than five dollars. In fact, it doesn’t matter how much money you spent. What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself. (Michael Norton)

Take a listen to Michael Norton to learn more about the link between money and happiness.

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Let’s Help Pave the Way

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This month we have celebrated women past and present who are shaping herstory! March’s Women’s History Month is an inspiration, reminding us of the success within our reach. While we celebrate these women, it is important to remember the barriers women face, especially women of color.

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The truth? We have a long way to go to create a just world for our girls. On the Polished Pebbles Facebook we recently shared an article from PayScale, “Gender and Pay at Work”. In this article, we read what has been repeated over and over…a pay gap exists between men and women. This is even when controlling for factors such as education level. How can we raise, inspire, and educate our girls; fill them with dreams, and then release them into an unjust system?

Let’s help pave the way! Community programs like Polished Pebbles are working to push more women into the workforce. The more we are present, the more we push at the glass ceiling, the closer we will come to it shattering. Polished Pebbles’ After-School Mentoring Program has career exploration as one of its main pillars. Girls have the opportunity to explore career fields through job shadowing and workforce development. Now who doesn’t want to support that?!

For Polished Pebbles to keep reaching their goals, they need your help! Consider a one time donation, or maybe join our monthly giving program! If you’re hearts pushing you in this direction, click here…

Thank you, supporters and readers!