In partnership with Boeing, the Seattle Sounders established “Change Champions,” an initiative that highlights local organizations and the impact they have in their communities.
Prior to the May 24th match against FC Dallas, the club honored the Foundation for Tacoma Students, an organization geared toward setting up kids in the Tacoma community for a prosperous life as it relates to education and their future endeavors after graduation.
“[Our mission] is to build and strengthen Tacoma’s community-wide movement to help every child achieve success, from cradle to college and career,” said Foundation for Tacoma Students Director of Development Elvin Bucu. “[It’s] an organization that has the opportunity to serve those who are serving the most vulnerable.”
Through the collaboration of local providers such as the Boys & Girls Clubs, the utilization of data and lived knowledge, the foundation finds different ways to ensure equity for all. Bucu described it as “the foundational principle of their work.”
“[Equity] underlies everything we do, and that specifically means we're committed to using data, so using both quantitative and qualitative data as like metrics and also combined with personal stories and experiences to identify the students and communities furthest from opportunity,” he said. “Once we do that, we then are committed to co designing strategies and solutions alongside the community.”
The foundation’s long-term goal is to have 70% of Tacoma Public School students earn a degree, technical certificate or gain a good earning wage employment opportunity within six years of high school graduation by 2030. In order to reach that target, the first step is for the foundation to partner with those who are aligned with their mission.
“We specifically partner with those who are serving our most vulnerable populations,” said Bucu. “Once we do that, we work together to identify what strategies are already working or possibly just need to be scaled or improved or are missing a piece, and that's when we leverage the rest of our community, and we have long standing relationships with those entities, but that's where implementation scaling happens.”
The Foundation for Tacoma Students also established Campaign Free Aid, which is an effort to increase, specifically, the amount of financial aid students receive. In doing so, the organization has expanded beyond Tacoma and into Pierce County where they are working with four different school districts and around 12 community-based partners to provide workshops in the area.
“At these workshops, we're identifying students who, again, are part of the demographic of students who need financial aid the most,” said Bucu. “We're working with them directly to start and complete financial aid applications, and that's part of our tracking. When we use data it's [about finding out] where all our students are in the financial aid stage, and what they need to actually complete and receive the funding.”
Maintaining progress in the foundations’ goal of success for these students comes with the sustainability of their partnered organizations and their overall funding.
“Our entire field is losing long standing funding sources, and it's both public and private, so government and private foundations, everyone's kind of tightening up and or slashing funding,” said Bucu. “So, it's more important now than ever for us all within the community to work together and not lose momentum, especially the momentum we've built over a decade plus of work.”
Sounders fans can support the Foundation for Tacoma Students’ initiative by heading to this link to provide any sort of donation as the organization looks toward bettering the lives of local students in need.
