AWESOME FOUNDATION GRANT AWARD WINNER
Moorhead Legacy Education Foundation At a time when headlines are railing against the evils of smartphones for kids, the Moorhead Legacy Education Foundation (MLEF) is hoping to use those same phones as a positive force to support school attendance. In the Moorhead school district, nearly 30% of students enrolled have missed 10 or more school days this year. Student facilitators at the schools who work one-on-one with those students and their families are crediting the lack of basic needs as one of the main culprits behind students missing school. And the number of families struggling with basic needs has only been increasing, especially since the start of the pandemic. When the situation became especially dire in December of 2022, Janelle Leiseth, Chair of the MLEF, put out a call on social media to try to encourage more donations. In the process, she learned of the Central Cass School mobile app, which allows students to request specific things they need right from their devices. Janelle thought a variation of the idea might be an important tool to apply to
Moorhead schools and reached out to the creator of the CC Treehouse app, Heidi Domier. “Heidi has a wealth of knowledge about logistics and our local community needs. She has offered to help MLEF get this launched following discussions and planning with the district,” Janelle said. To that end, MLEF has been reaching out to other nonprofits, which already help provide various basic need items to schools, to see if they would be interested in teaming up to explore the idea. The response so far has been very positive. “We are all looking to benefit the schools, students, and families, and the needs are always changing. If we can make it easier to determine what the current needs are, and share the legwork, we can do so much more than we can as separate entities,” Janelle said. “My biggest hope is that we will be able to create a network of nonprofits working together.” The Cass-Clay chapter of the Awesome Foundation also thinks the idea has merit, and named Spud Impact (MLEF’s program to address student, teacher/ staff, and school facility needs) their February 2023 grantee to provide startup funds for the project.
BY Brandi Malarkey, Owner, It’s All Malarkey
122
APRIL 2023
“Schools have budgets for school pantries, but they are very minimal so there is a lot that isn’t covered by the budget,” Janelle said. “If we can better streamline the process to figure out what the current needs are, we're really excited that this will help us all better target what areas to support.” MLEF is in discussions with the high school Career Academy in the hopes that the students in the coding program can not only help build the app, but maintain it over time to make sure everything stays up-to-date. “Students, actually, do love to help their peers if they can, and they are likely to be more responsive to the changes needed over time. We’ll be more effective if we are all working together.” The current vision is that the app will work a lot like online ordering from a store. Students or families will use the app to make a request for their specific needs, which will be filled by volunteers, delivered to the school, and then distributed by school facilitators or counselors. School staff could also make orders on behalf of students who do not have access or are too young for devices of their own.