  Dear Friend of Girls Inc. PNW,
What an exciting couple of months it has been since I last wrote to you. On Friday, April 23rd, nearly 500 members of the Girls Inc. of the Pacific Northwest community attended our premier Strong Smart Bold Brunch. Together, we raised over $300,000 in support of strong, smart, and bold youth across the Pacific Northwest! Thank you so much for your unwavering support.
This Spring Term, we’ve provided consistent programming through a nearly completely virtual format. Our youth learned about comprehensive sex education in honor of Girls Inc. Week and mental health in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. They went on virtual field trips, interacted with guest speakers, prioritized social and emotional wellness and moved their bodies through online yoga classes. Towards the end of the term, we celebrated our amazing Eureka! Class of 2021 graduates. These graduating seniors spent the last five years in our Eureka! STEM and college readiness program, participating in monthly learning sessions, summer camps, a group internship and then individual externships at local companies in dynamic STEM industries!
Now, as we gear up for our various age-based summer camps, we are excited for summer and also preparing for increased demand for our programming this school year. As youth prepare to return to school this fall, they are returning after a year and a half of disrupted classroom learning, separated from their school buildings, and their learning and social networks. Never before has our mission and programming been more necessary and relevant. Our youth need our mission to inspire them to be strong, smart, and bold as they reemerge into a new world after the pandemic, and our is plan to help them thrive and grow as future leaders in a society that will need change agents more than ever.
At the beginning of the fall, we will be in touch to preview our school year programming. We will also highlight our expansion effort, as we are newer to the Seattle area, as the only two-state Girls Inc. affiliate in the nation. We are honored to serve in both Oregon and Washington as expansion trailblazers!
As we look ahead to the next fiscal year, we are dedicated to communicating through the press, our social media and through this newsletter. Stay tuned and have a wonderful summer!
Gratefully,  Cyreena Boston Ashby Chief Executive Officer  GIRLS GROUPS  Girls Groups ran another virtual term, this time providing a fresh take on the Mind+Body curriculum. Youth explored stress management, consent and body boundaries, and physical movement and mindfulness as a method of self-care. A variety of guest speakers joined us throughout the term and youth were even able to take a virtual trip to Mt St Helens to explore the volcano’s caldera! Most notably, we had the pleasure of continuing our partnership with the amazing Amisha Stanley, known amongst Girls Groups as “The Unicorn”, who continued offering monthly yoga and wellness sessions. As spring of 2021 brought a return to hybrid learning and continued change for many schools, these sessions remained a constant outlet and space for our youth to come together and reconnect.
This summer we’ll be offering a combination of STEAM learning opportunities for Girls Group participants. We are also very excited to work alongside partners and plan our return to in-person programming this fall!
EUREKA! Eureka! finished Spring Term with themed months in human-centered design and partner-led, hands-on activities with Planned Parenthood and Portland Space Aerospace. We will wrap up our school-year programming with a week-long Work Readiness Boot Camp for our Fifth-Years to help prepare them for their upcoming externships. Externship placements include Oregon MESA, Cambia, Siemens CDC, OMSI, and more! In May, we celebrated our Eureka! Class of 2021 graduates with a virtual graduation ceremony featuring a candle lighting, youth spotlight videos, and gift baskets (and some tears from Girls Inc. PNW staff members!). We cannot wait to see what these 10 young leaders do in their next chapter.  Applications for the newest Eureka! class, the Class of 2026, closed at the end of April. Please join us in welcoming our newest cohort, who had their first foray into Eureka! programming with a virtual orientation!
Finally, Eureka! is thick in the midst of gearing up for summer. We are preparing summer supply kits for our First-, Second-, and Fourth-Years — these supply kits will support full participation in virtual summer camp. Our Third-Years are also getting ready for their conservation internship with Northwest Youth Corps and for their virtual projects in graphic design.
LEADERSHIP COUNCIL Throughout this year, Leadership Council members have been working on individual advocacy projects which focus on a topic that they are passionate about, as a means of leading and facilitating meaningful change in their communities. They will be presenting their long-awaited project outcomes to the larger group during our final July meeting.
Leadership Council youth will also be receiving summer send-off supply kits to congratulate them on all of their dedication and hard work, and recruitment for our 2021-2022 class of leaders will start this September!  STRONG SMART BOLD BRUNCH  Thank you again to everyone who sponsored, donated and (virtually) attended our premier Strong Smart Bold Brunch. With your support, we raised over $300,000 to inspire girls to be strong, smart, and bold in the Pacific Northwest!
THANK YOU FOUNDATION FUNDERS Thanks to the support of our many funders and donors, our programs can continue to serve strong, smart, and bold youth across the Pacific Northwest. While we are incredibly thankful to all of our funders, a few of our foundation funders are highlighted here.
The Oregon Community Foundation funded Eureka! at $100,000, and the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation awarded us a $300,000 grant, one of our largest grants ever! Brand new funders like State Farm Insurance, Alaska Airlines, and The Women’s Foundation of Oregon joined longtime funders like LAM Research, Bank of America, Applied Materials, PGE, ASML, Legacy Health, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, the Firstenburg Foundation, and Community Foundation for SW Washington. We are so very grateful for your support!  WE ASKED WHY THEY JOINED GIRLS INC. PNW Elisa Landers – Vice President | Private Wealth Advisor, U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management
I’m very happy to join the Girls Inc. PNW board because I’ve been looking for a way to positively influence the lives of young kids (especially girls) for a long time and Girls Inc. PNW is the perfect organization to do that with.
I have a young daughter at home, and I strongly believe that Girls Inc. PNW will help make the world a place where she can continue to be strong, smart and bold. A lot of organizations have similar missions, but few have shown the same ability to execute their plans.
Joining an organization with such a proven track record of helping girls achieve their goals as they grow is incredibly exciting to me, and I look forward to doing my part to contribute to its continued success.  If you’re interested in giving back but would rather give something tangible instead of funds, you’re in luck. We’ve just registered and launched an AmazonSmile Wish List!
Our wish list will be updated quarterly in accordance with each term’s program curricula. Simply browse the Girls Inc. PNW Wish List, add items to your cart, check out, and select our office as the shipping location – it’s that easy. Furthermore, when you shop using AmazonSmile and select Girls Inc. of the Pacific Northwest as your designated charity, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchase price to us. So, not only will you be purchasing and donating specific items we need, Amazon will also be giving a percentage of your money back to Girls Inc. PNW! Thank you in advance for shopping in support of our mission.  20 new Portland-area executives you should know (Q1 2021), Portland Business Journal Leader Board S.T.E.M. feat. Isabelle Craft, Enraged Podcast Girls Inc. tackles learning loss, The Columbian Turning the Page and Building Better Narratives, PRICHARD Rising Up and Making Your Voice Heard, Roar with Lakecia Gunter Episode 17: Cyreena Boston Ashby, All Shine, No Flash 
Our Contact Information Girls Inc. of the Pacific Northwest 4800 S Macadam Avenue 503.230.0054
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