Dear TDI Friend —
You may have recently received a copy of our spring appeal letter, asking you to consider supporting the next generation of TDI. Over the last 25 years, we've served more than 900 young people with a welcoming community and life-changing experiences, and we want to keep doing that for many more in the years to come. Please consider a donation to TDI's capacity building and help us launch our next phase, which you can read more about below. If you are unfamiliar with TDI, you can read more about what we do and who we are for.
Our History
This summer, we celebrated 25 years of TDI in Johnson with a gathering of current and former campers, family, and friends.
Since the founding of TDI in 1998, we have worked to create an affirming, educational, and supportive community for Vermont's youth and their families, and in doing so have created an extended family of our own. Indeed, at the celebration, many of our alumni spoke of how much TDI had meant to them: as a home away from home, with people who helped them flourish into creative, capable, caring adults.
We are so proud of the good work TDI has done in the past 25 years and we hope to do even more in the 25 years to come! But we need your help.
Our Challenges
Right now, TDI depends on lots of love and unpaid labor. We have no permanent staff; our longtime Co-Directors organize it on evenings and weekends with the help of some counselors and our volunteer Board. Our substantial community outreach efforts—parent connections, social media, monthly newsletters to the TDI family—are all likewise done by volunteers. This past summer, enrollment dropped well below pre-pandemic levels, and informing people about TDI is harder than ever in our noisy media environment. And, while we are able to offer limited need-based scholarships, our tuition-based model means we cannot make TDI available to all the students in the state who currently want it (let alone all those who could benefit). Meanwhile, our dedicated founding team (Carol, Lucy, and Ellen) have expressed a clear need to take a step back and let the next generation take over.
Based on public data and educational research, we estimate that around 8,000 students (and their families) from Vermont could benefit from our programming, and we are not close to serving all of them. But before we start to reach out to them, we need a solid foundation on which to stand.
We need your help to make TDI sustainable, so that it can be as vibrant and long-lasting as the friendships it has fostered.
Our Future
Over the last five years the Board has met regularly to discuss these challenges and engage in long-range planning. We’ve talked to alumni, veteran staff, and the leaders of other organizations that serve students like ours to get their insight on what we ought to do to uphold our mission and vision, and what resources are necessary to make that happen.
We believe that a sustainable and healthy TDI is built around three pillars:
- Permanent staff: a small number of people who are working a paid job to organize our programs, raise money, and keep our community together. We anticipate this would start with one person working a significant part time job, but would eventually like to transition to a small (single digit) team of people who work full time running all TDI programs.
- The summer camp: make sure that our core summer program at Johnson remains vibrant, well-attended, and well-run in the years to come, with a great selection of strands and emotional/social development opportunities for students from around the state, regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances.
- Parent connections: a network of parents from around the state who can help each other advocate for, and build community among, their kids, and build out a robust set of informational and educational resources that can help each parent figure out how to best support their child
Based on research and interviews with other small nonprofits and those that advise them, our first priority is to hire a part-time Executive Director in 2023, for a target of 20 hours a week of dedicated work to building capacity for TDI. Their primary focus will be engaging foundations, philanthropists, and alumni to raise money and support their own work and the future work of TDI. They will also observe the work of the camp team as they plan and run TDI 2023 to increase their familiarity with the program; in the long run, we hope that they will be able to take over running TDI with our network of volunteers and veteran staff.
We've set up this campaign with the primary purpose of supporting the search, hiring, training, orientation, and initial part-time salary of this Executive Director, and have pegged the goal to the anticipated budget for that process. However, we may use the funds to support any of the above three pillars of TDI.
You can use it to donate directly to us, or to start your own peer-to-peer fundraising page to tell your own TDI story!
These fundraisers are making a difference
Show your support and fundraise today to achieve our goals !
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