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President's Message
Our League takes the next step In February, our active membership voted in a new project, The Next Step, to begin Fall 2012. Last year as we prepared for this year of Meeting You Where You Are, the Presidential Task Force, Community Advisory Board, and our membership Neighborhood Speak Out responses identified a community need for a parenting program. Many times, through our projects, we assist children who have already become victims of abuse or neglect, and the idea from our members and community advisors is to approach the root of the problem rather than solely dealing with and coping with the results. Through community study and soliciting feedback, we learned there is a need for a parenting program in Beaumont to guide, to teach, and to inspire parents in positive ways. After identifying this community need, we were approached by the YWCA Beaumont who had also identified the need for a parenting program. Through this collaboration, a project was born. The Next Step will be a pilot parenting project to select and to implement a parenting program to teach communities of women to value their children’s safety and to create functional family systems. The JLB will work collaboratively with the YWCA to enhance and facilitate the project with ideas, leadership, and volunteers. The JLB Next Step volunteers will assist two focus groups of women at Plymouth Village and the Family Resource Center in selecting a parenting program under the guidance of experts educated in this area. The program will first be implemented in these two communities, and then in the greater Beaumont community. The women in the parenting program will be empowered through their input in selecting the actual program. These women will use technologies new to them to create communication tools, brochures and websites to disseminate information. Materials for the program will then be available on loan to other community groups. Thus, the parenting program will not only assist women and parents in the initial neighborhoods, but the curriculum and materials can be loaned and used by other community groups in the greater Beaumont area. It is our hope its impact will serve this community in truly needed and beneficial ways, improve the lives of children, their parents, and help families function with heightened solidarity and strength. It is a noble goal - one that will be hard to measure in the short term, but like many of the Junior League of Beaumont’s goals, time will bear fruit. We will look back on this project and others through which we endeavor to serve, and realize the “means” to the positive “end” were worth it. Meeting this community’s needs in relevant ways was worth the energies and resources expended. I am proud of the ladies who worked to develop this project - Rebecca Poppe, the smart, energetic, and dedicated chair of Project Research and Development and the valued committee members of her team. They have displayed, as so many of our Junior League volunteers have this year, true SERVANT LEADERSHIP. Servant leaders in our JLB, as Vicki Clark coaches, “display foresight, imagine possibilities, anticipate the future, proceed with clarity of purpose, and take courageous and decisive action.” Go forth and conquer. I know this League will continue to do great things. Take the Next Step and meet this community’s needs where they are. Thank you to EACH of our members for imagining the possibilities of what this League can achieve and taking action. Serving you and this community, Ronda Butler Harkey |
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