Seeds of Hope Family Events, Abundant Living, & our Mentor Program
Family Focused Events: Corporate events are held on a monthly to quarterly frequency in an effort to reunite the camp volunteer staff and children to keep connections flowing throughout the year. Family inclusive events are coordinated with the goal of engaging caregivers and children in active play, social skill development, and relationship strengthening. A Valentine’s celebration, spring and fall festivals at Little Creek Farm on Walter Mabe Road in Lawsonville, trips to the Tanglewood Festival of Lights, and Breakfast with Santa are just a few of the gatherings we plan. Mentor/Mentee Program: Caregivers have the option to request individual mentor pairings with their children as volunteers become available. Mentors, mentees, and parents meet to decide the frequency, duration, and location of visits as well as the nature of the mentor/mentee relationship. For example, some children may simply need tutoring services. Others may need a big brother/big sister who makes play dates, or attends family outings and ballgames. Still other may simply need weekly phone calls or letters of encouragement. Contracts are signed by each party in the mentoring relationship defining the standards to be followed. The pairings are monitored to ensure the satisfaction of all parties. Abundant Living Program: The Abundant Living program was launched in January 2019 in collaboration with the NC Cooperative Extension, Family and Consumer Sciences division. This program utilized “Faithful Families’ Eating Smart and Moving More Lessons, which included 9 sessions on healthy eating and physical activity strategies, including nutrition, meal preparation and cooking, food safety, and increasing daily physical activity. Through group discussions, recipe taste tests, and activities, individuals and families were encouraged to set goals to lead healthier lives. The curriculum also prompted discussions about changes that can be made in their local community. Additional long-term Abundant Living goals address: 1) Healthy Lifestyle, 2) Food insecurity - networking with local agriculturally focused groups through schools and the NC Cooperative Extension program to teach individuals how to install home gardens in food desert regions, training participants on garden care, growth and yield expectations, growing season and harvest timetables, and suitable plantings based on family needs/tastes/size, canning and food preservation “parties”, and 3) Youth Entrepreneurship - acquiring and repurposing a local business venue into a useable marketplace, creating a retail program, employing HHH youth, in which products raised, produced, packaged, labelled, and marketed by HHH participants are featured.
As of July 2019, Heroes Helping Heroes has served over 713 individual Stokes, Surry, Forsyth, Yadkin and surrounding area children at no cost to them or their families with the Seeds of Hope Summer Day Camp and it's mentor programs. If you would like to enroll your family in our programming, please contact Jana Elliott at 336-972-5266 or email her at [email protected]Program application