Year End Dinner Celebration, June 12, 2008

This year's dinner theme is "Coming Together. Growing Together."

We hope our current and former students and volunteers, our leaders, parents and other supporters will join with us on June 12th to celebrate the work students and volunteers have done during this 2007-08 school year, and to help us kick off summer activities, and the 2008-09 school year.

In the Lion King movies, the Circle of Life was a main theme. At Cabrini Connections we have a "cycle of tutoring/mentoring" that starts at the beginning of one school year, and continues through the end of that year, and into the following year.

We have two seniors this spring, who will join more than 520 other students who have attended Cabrini Connections one to seven consecutive years since 1993. While these students are headed for the next stage of their lives, and still need our help so that they successfully negotiate the challenges of college, work, and families, most of our kids are 7th to 11th graders, who will need our support next year, and for the next several years.

Thus, the dinner is a fund raising event, as well as a fun and warm celebration of the relationships that form at Cabrini Connections.

In leading up to the dinner we're hoping that some of our alumni, both students and volunteers, will post message on this blog, or in our Facebook or MySpace communities, to tell us what they are doing now, and to tell us how Cabrini Connections, or the mentors they have met through Cabrini Connections, have had an impact in their lives. We'd also like current volunteers and students to post their own reflections.

Student, volunteer and alumni stories are as important as the stories of what has happened in the past year because they show the real potential of programs like this. They show that we can reduce the isolation of poverty by creating a network of youth and adults that stay connected in many ways, for many years beyond high school.

Thank you to Courtland Madock and Gabriel Rodriguez, who are the co-chairs of this year's dinner. They deserve a lot of credit for it's success, along with a team of volunteers who are helping them.

Here are some links to follow to learn more about the dinner, making a donation, or connecting on-line:

Donor page - http://www.cabriniconnections.net/donate

Facebook page - here

MySpace page - here

Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Ning.com