LifeWorks NW will be hosting the 13th Annual Portland’s Original Iron Chef on Thursday, October 10, 2013 at the Portland Art Museum to benefit Children’s Relief Nursery. It features local chefs serving hearty, signature appetizers to guests who then vote for their favorite to be the new reigning champion! The event includes a silent auction, live auction, and seated program with dessert.
Where: Mark Building, Portland Art Museum, 1119 SW Park Ave.
When: Thursday, October 10, 2013 – Doors open at 6pm
Tickets: $125/person
Ticket sales will be available this summer. To inquire about sponsorships, be alerted when tickets are on sale, or for more information, please contact Dana Gantz at 503-283-4776 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
— Posted on 03/28 at 07:57 AM
“Children’s Relief Nursery has become an official program of LifeWorks NW effective July 1, 2012,” announced Mary Monnat, LifeWorks NW President & CEO. This step represents an increased commitment to the families both organizations serve and establishes a best-in-class approach to meeting the needs of the greater community.
Click here to read the Press Release.
— Posted on 07/02 at 08:51 AM
Your Gift Makes a Difference.
Any way you choose to support healthy families, your gift always…
• Serves over hundreds of kids and families each year, making them whole again.
• Gives young children and their parents a chance to overcome trauma.
• Teaches parents how to be healthy and positive role models for their children.
• Most importantly, your gift helps prevent child abuse and neglect in our community.
Please make your gift online today to give kids hope for a fulfilling life. Thank you.
— Posted on 02/11 at 03:34 PM
As part of our mission to continue to keep children safe and families strong, Children’s Relief Nursery’s Board of Directors announces a potential strategic partnership and leadership change. Janice Gratton, Children’s Relief Nursery Board of Director’s Executive Committee, states, “We are in preliminary discussions with a potential services partner. We have made a few changes in staff leadership positions. The Board and executive team’s goal is to continue a strong and vibrant program for the families we serve. Joining forces with another organization can make for a more efficient and economical infra-structure, particularly in the current economic environment.” The Board has appointed Karen Ward, former Director of Finance and Administration, at Children’s Relief Nursery, to Interim Executive Director. Children’s Relief Nursery will share other changes this winter when the strategic plan is complete.
— Posted on 02/10 at 11:41 AM
Are you ready? Yes, it’s that time of year once again, as the top chefs in town go head-to-head in a culinary showdown of epic food preparation! The 11th Annual Portland’s Original Iron Chef is coming up in April. You don’t want to miss this year, as Adam tries to continue his streak.
Reigning champion, Adam Sappington of the Country Cat Dinner House & Bar, will defend his three-year Iron Chef title against Adam Higgs of Acadia, winner of the 2011 People’s Choice Award. It’s Adam vs. Adam…who will win?
Friday, April 20, 2012
6:00 to 10:00 pm
Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Avenue
Click here for more information, ticket sales, and sponsorship information.
— Posted on 02/09 at 11:15 AM
There are still a few seats left for this amazing event! Get your ticket at the door!
Here’s what we have in store for you:
- A vote on the best “People’s Choice Chef” – sample delectable hors d’oeuvres from hot Portland restaurants
- Fabulous auction items
- Unforgettable entertainment
- A sizzling live cooking competition (a la TV show Iron Chef) featuring Portland local chefs Adam Sappington from the Country Cat Dinnerhouse and Bar and Adam Higgs from Acadia
Raffle Ticket Presale
Portland’s Original Iron Chef 2012 on April 20 is rapidly approaching. But you can get in on the early action now!
A limited number of raffle tickets are now available for chances to win truly fabulous prizes while helping Children’s Relief Nursery fund another year of critical services to area at-risk families.
You don’t need to be present at the event to win, so even if you can’t make it to the big event, you can still get in on the action!
Just 200 $50 tickets are available to win round-trip tickets for two anywhere Alaska Airlines flies.
Click here to see where you could go!
Just 100 $100 tickets are available to win a week at the private luxury Mexican villa of Casa Piazza. Oceanfront, 8,000 sq. ft. of luxury amenities with a full staff!
Click here for villa pictures and details!
— Posted on 02/08 at 03:08 PM
Thank you to Matt Hatzi, Thomas Elisondo, and Bobby Harsell for all the incredible work they have put into raising crucial funds for Children’s Relief Nursery!
They are the energy behind Changes for Charity, an epic fundraising event held over 4 days, May 17-20.
The event features:
- FREE haircuts by professional stylists at Salon Luxe
- Live bands and DJ, including a VIP “After-party jam session”
- Professional Glamour Shots
- Silent Auction, including a “Preview Party” at Marino’s Adriatic Cafe
- Cupcake Contest
- Refreshments
Get more information, make a donation, or sign up to volunteer at http://changes4charity.webs.com.
— Posted on 02/01 at 11:31 AM
Children’s Relief Nursery is ecstatic to announce that we have made the 2011 list of the third annual 100 Best Nonprofits to Work For in Oregon! The rankings were based on the confidential input of nearly 5,500 employees from 170 nonprofits across Oregon, who answered 35 questions about workplace satisfaction such as benefits, management, trust, work environment and career development. The survey was voluntary and free of charge, and independently calculated by research partners Davis, Hibbitts and Midghall.
Learn more at http://www.oregonbusiness.com/100-best-nonprofits-2011.
— Posted on 10/22 at 02:05 PM
Click to view Alexander’s video.
If you feel moved to support clients like Megan, you may make a gift online today.
Thank you for your support!
— Posted on 10/21 at 01:43 PM
By Nicholas D. Kristoff
Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.
“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.
“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”
One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.
Maybe it seems absurd to propose expansion of early childhood education at a time when budgets are being slashed. Yet James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown that investments in early childhood education pay for themselves. Indeed, he argues that they pay a return of 7 percent or more — better than many investments on Wall Street.
“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”
One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes.
We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up. Still, new research suggests that early childhood education can work even in the real world at scale.
Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.
Not so fast.
One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.
Professor Deming found that in these life outcomes, Head Start had about 80 percent of the impact of the Perry program — a stunning achievement.
Something similar seems to be true of the large-scale prekindergarten program in Boston. Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Christina Weiland, both of Harvard, found that it erased the Latino-white testing gap in kindergarten and sharply reduced the black-white gap.
President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.
That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.
— Posted on 10/21 at 09:22 AM
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