The impact of Giving Tuesday
THANK YOU!
That’s all there is to say to the 405 individual donors that made a donation to DC SCORES during this year’s Giving Tuesday. Together we reached our goal of raising more than $30,000 to give kids a voice. That’s a FULL YEAR of SCORES for nearly 30 kids!
Rachel Gorosh, DC SCORES program coordinator and Brightwood Education Campus - Middle School poetry coach, saw the impact of giving a kid a voice this season as she coached the Panthers. Read her testimonial below and watch Natalia’s Poetry Slam! performance.
We started off the fall season at Brightwood Education Campus Middle School with a full team of poet-athletes excited to play soccer, but feeling nervous about their poetry skills. Yet with each new day of practice, I saw my team become more confident in their writing.
As we began to prepare for the Poetry Slam!, we asked our poet-athletes to take their notebooks home and write on their own time. Natalia, whose poem was chosen by our team on a blind vote, wrote the poem “Think.” I was blown away when I heard what she had written. As one of the youngest members of our team, Natalia began the season as a timid, quiet girl and by the end, she had a great group of friends and took the stage in front of hundreds of people at the Slam! with confidence and poise.
On the way to the 20th Annual Poetry Slam!, the Brightwood Panthers nervously chatted with teammates, unsure of what the night would bring. On the way home, after earning the second-place trophy, energy and excitement radiated throughout the bus. Team members asked me if we could continue having writing practice even though the season was over and they talked about how they couldn’t wait to go to school the next day to tell their friends what they had accomplished.
A couple of the team members even said that it was the best day of their lives.
From the beginning of the season to the end, I witnessed not only one student’s transformation, but my entire team’s transformation. This is a true testament as to how incredible DC SCORES truly is.
Thanks to your generous donation, thousands of poet-athletes like Natalia and the rest of the Brightwood Panthers will be able to build their confidence and find their voices.
Thank you for taking the time to “Think” yesterday and donate to this amazing cause.