My Mother's Voice

Reviewed by the Sacramento Region Community Foundation
Fundraise

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$100,000 Goal

My Mother's Voice was founded in 2006 to provide early literacy, resources, and enriched experiences to children with limited access, especially because of unstable family structure, situational and generational poverty, and lower socioeconomic status. In our initial years, MMV supplied at-risk students with school supplies and essentials and offered mentoring and tutoring. We expanded our work with educators and social workers to increase literacy in primary grades, reduce high death rates of infants and toddlers, and provide support and stability to teen parents who remained in school and continued on to college.

This year, we are expanding all programming to fill the widening gulf in learning caused by the school shutdowns and the limited access to technology in homes of low-income families. The families are needing food, rent and basic support to get through daily struggles. When low level jobs in restaurants and housework are gone, the stress in greatly amplified. We get to the source of the issues and work through them with the families so that it isn't just dropping off essentials. It is important to work with and mentor the families to find the keys to recovery. Budgeting, finding adult education and job opportunities, parenting resources are all supplied to keep the families stable. Our mission is prevention, access, and independence.

In 2011, 2015, and again in 2018, we were featured in the Sacramento Bee's Book of Dreams articles highlighting our programs enriching the lives our most vulnerable children and families. MMV has continued to expand work in the highest poverty (Title I) schools bringing our Early Learning programs to classrooms in multiple counties. The most important time to make a significant difference in educational success is from birth through third grade. This is where we concentrate our efforts in these programs with enrichment for children as well as parenting support. Our wraparound programs work with teachers and counselors to identify and help the children who also need the essentials of food, clothing, supplies, medical, and dental care as well as other resources.

Our work in the highest poverty Title 1 schools in the greater Sacramento area, starts in PreK through 3rd grade which are the most significant grades that determine future success, not only academically but financially and socially as well. If a child is not reading at grade level by the end of grade three, their path to adult life is almost predetermined. Nearly 90% are destined to be high school dropouts, go into the criminal justice system, stay mired in minimum wage jobs, have children in their teens, or become addicted, with rates even higher for foster children.

Our programs have been highly successful in significantly altering that course: e.g., last year over 20% of our first graders are already reading chapter books. Prior to the pandemic, we visited all of the classrooms several times a month and stayed with these schools/classes year after year. The children know us and continue their progress uninterrupted. We have immediate communication with the teachers. The feedback from them and from the parents is 100% positive with tangible increases in reading abilities and enthusiasm for reading at home. Our impact is felt throughout the school.

Mission

We are a California-based charity working to end generational poverty through early education and wraparound support for children in need. From the start of the global pandemic, the wraparound support has been expanded to fill the enormous need of those families already at great risk of homelessness and hunger prior to widespread health and economic disaster.

Needs

Our Early Reader program, A Book of My Own, gives each of our 1,200 students one book per month, for a total of 13,200 books. Additional educational support materials are needed for bilingual students and their parents, along with materials and technology are needed to support parents who are learning English along with their children so that they can help them with their homework. If all books are acquired at wholesale nonprofit pricing, the total cost is $82,700.

We need to continue our greatly expanded Cover the Basics program, where hundreds of our children have been identified as not having basic needs because of environmental situations and rising costs. Since early 2020, we have supported the children's essential needs as well as the families. This includes clothing like pants, shirts, shoes, food, toiletries, haircuts, and other daily essentials. This service is now combined with our provision of a fleece blanket, warm pajamas, and a hat and gloves for every child during the winter months. This totals $43,650.

No Hungry Mondays, our food program, has expanded into supporting the entire family, not just the child in school. The pandemic and inflation have devastated low-income families. We have found families saving and sharing their children's bag lunches when we make home visits. Food drop-offs from grocery stores and restaurants we partner with, not only feed families fully nutritious meals but keep the jobs running in these same areas where the parents often work. Food and shelter as the basics essential to life are combined in this program where we negotiate with landlords to ensure families have a rental agreement that works for both landlords and residents. No one is behind in rent, and the families are budgeting for what is possible to prevent homelessness and continue to work. We also assist and help find resources to pay utilities and medical bills and other essentials for families with no social security numbers which are needed to qualify for other programs that help residents. This is an ever-shifting number because of the changing economic environment. The expected budget is $48,000.

My Teacher's Pocket and Just Teach are part of our nascent Building Excellence programming. This year we are including essential curricula that our Title 1 teachers cannot afford to pay out of pocket. In the introductory years, the program spent approximately $27,000 on supplies for the students and teachers, with a portion of that donated. This is a critical need to keep low-income students at a level of competitiveness with their counterparts in higher-income demographic schools. We are testing a pilot program of tutoring for students most in need who have been recommended by their teachers. All of these students need extra help, and none of the parents would be able to afford a tutor. Funds would pay a stipend, especially for bi-lingual tutors who need assistance themselves and to pay for fingerprinting and background checks. To fully implement all programs would cost an estimated $55,000.

Little Seedlings provides clothing and essentials to children who have been removed from unsafe living conditions and are in some form of emergency foster care. This program also covers families who are suddenly experiencing homelessness, have situational poverty (often because of natural disasters, e.g., fires, pandemic), or are new immigrants with no other resources and are fearful of reaching out to agencies. Because we see the students in the school, the parents trust us, and we are able to assess and provide help immediately. This year, funding costs are $25,600.

Equity Statement

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Framework

We believe there are several important areas that focus on habits, the things we do, that either enable diversity, equity, and inclusion or don’t. By identifying these habits, we can begin to make changes that enable and promote equitable practices. This is what weaves true inclusion, diversity, and equity into daily lives and prevents it from being a document of dry legal and bureaucratic language that’s stored away and not part of habitual practice.

ACCESS

Access is the importance of a welcoming environment and the habits that create it.

This is what our participants (families, students, teachers, volunteers, employees, and community members) experience when they interact with My Mother’s Voice. It’s the environment and culture of our place in time. A great example of this is our Welcome Project. It is what access really means in the physical and non-physical environment. It is access to the basics as well as the opportunities.

ATTITUDE

Attitude looks at how willing people are to embrace inclusion and diversity and to take meaningful action.

We ask ourselves how willing we are to actually make this a habit. We can identify a gap between simply wanting to be inclusive and putting up a statement and actually doing something about it. Our attitude is about having the willingness to take real action.

CHOICE

Choice is all about finding out what options people want and how they want to get involved.

We can identify what a participant can do. Choice is the friend of inclusion. By offering many options for participation, we have more diverse people involved in our activities.

PARTNERSHIPS

Partnerships are how individual and organizational relationships are formed and how effective they are in practice.

A partnership could be as easy as an introduction, conversation, and a handshake. It can be really informal. You’ve just got to connect people. It could be more formal with agreements, MOUs, and contracts, but partnerships are what bind us together and join our communities. They need to be trustworthy, transparent, and respectful relationships. There are influential partnerships in networks, and they can become key partners if the working relationship has the same ethics and habits.

POLICY

Policy considers how an organization commits to and takes responsibility for inclusion and diversity.

Policy is about holding yourself, your employees, organization, and community to account for inclusion. It’s about saying “Inclusion and diversity are important.” But much more than that, it’s about saying, “This is how we’re going to address it, and this is what it means for us” and then having mechanisms to actually deliver on those statements.

We are exceptionally proud of rejecting the old practice of selecting board members who can bring in funds which in practice means selecting people of wealth, race, and background who have experienced few if any of the life situations we are working to improve. It is a losing game no matter how it is pitched. Our working board is comprised of people who have life experiences that match our families and can provide direction with knowledge and impact. Our challenge board, a nonvoting board, is competitive, resource, and contact rich.

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunity explores what options are available for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This is similar to the act of choice but not the same. Opportunity asks the question, “what do you want to do?”. We can explore the opportunities that are actually available in the place where we live and work. As an example, community members might have a whole range of things that they want to do or achieve, but can they actually take advantage of that choice? We must ensure we understand the issues that prevent the actual opportunities from existing for them. We need to make sure the salaries are livable so that someone besides an older retired person with assets and a pension can afford to work at our organization. We need to post those salaries with the job description so that we are transparent. We must make sure our immigrant families can have the opportunities to choose to live in a clean, safe environment. We make sure our employees, volunteers, and community members are considered a resource and their input is valued and heard. We have zero tolerance for bullying and harassment. This is making sure the choice can match the opportunity.

Posted on our website:

https://www.mymothersvoice.org/whats-new.html

Organization Data

Summary

Organization name

My Mother's Voice

other names

MMV

Year Established

2006

Tax id (EIN)

26-0606529

Mission Category

Youth Development

Operating Budget

$0-$50,000

Organization Need

Funding: Program

Demographics Served

Immigrants & refugees, Youth & Children, Low-income individuals/families

BIPOC Leadership

Board Chair

Local Counties Served

El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Yolo

Equity Statement

Equity Statement

Address

8331 Sierra College Blvd. Suite 206
Roseville, CA 95661

Service areas

Placer, CA, US

Sacramento, CA, US

El Dorado, CA, US

Sutter, CA, US

Yolo, CA, US

Phone

916-770-6887

Email

donjamarie@mymothersvoice.org

Website

http://www.mymothersvoice.org

Social Media