The Park City Education Foundation started their Beat the Call campaign on Monday. They have a unique opportunity to leverage their fundraising efforts this year.
The Park City Education Foundation, like most nonprofits, has had to pivot their fundraising efforts this year due to COVID-19 distancing precautions. Executive Director Abby McNulty told KPCW for the first time in a couple of decades of fall fundraising, they have a matching challenge grant of $50,000. Their goal is to get 100% participation from everyone who has a child in the district.
“Yea, well we’re so grateful. Three families came together to provide us with a matching grant of $50,000 to support our efforts in our back to school beat the call fundraising campaign so every donation that's given between the start of school and Sept. 25 will be matched dollar for dollar up to $50,000.”
McNulty says there is a significant need to have philanthropic investments made in the classroom because 96% of the school tax dollars are redistributed to other districts around the state.
“All of our programs that we fund are on our website PCEF4kids.org. And they’re listed by school as well if you’re interested in seeing how PCEF supports your kid at Treasure Mountain or Ecker Hill or Jeremy Ranch for example. And we also have key initiatives that we support. So, pre-school and after school and elementary art, Park City CAPS and Bright Futures. We have large initiatives that we invest in.”
They fund about 100 programs that are found throughout the entire school district. They’re emphasizing new initiatives this year to help teachers conduct classes virtually and to help underserved families with school supplies.
“And new for us this year is a really robust emergency grant program for teachers that we started when our schools closed in March and our teachers had to transition to remote learning. There was a need for last-minute funds, you know, to support new needs that were cropping up due to the new learning environment. Those funds supported everything from technology tools for teachers to actual learning supplies for families. And we’re continuing that program this year at a much more robust level. We’ve already distributed resources through that emergency teacher grant fund to support things like outdoor classrooms.”
The UPS Store sponsors the Beat the Call campaign and plans to grant $8,000 to the school that has the highest number of donation participants.
For more information and to make donations, visit the Park City Education Foundation's website.
