The Rediscover Your Heart award was exactly what we needed to jump-start our drop-in dinner series. We started hosting drop-in dinners a few years back when we first moved to Brooklyn to meet our neighbors and friends. The idea was straightforward – every other Monday night we cooked and friends and neighbors were welcome to drop by and bring their friends. We never knew who or how many people would show up, but we wanted to create a space where people could feel free to drop in on good food, good people, and good conversation. We wanted to inspire others to host nights as well, but it never quite took off and eventually we stopped hosting.


We always felt that there was something special that happened when people came over to break bread with others. In New York City as in many urban centers, apartments are small and most people go out to socialize. In addition, most people are hyper-scheduled with multiple events, places to go and people to see. They don’t necessarily cook or use their home as a gathering place. What we envisioned is that we let our friends and their friends know that our house will be open on a regular basis – no need to RSVP or plan, if they happen to be in the neighborhood or have a free night or just feel the need for some community or good food, they can come by.


After we received the award, we realized that we needed to revamp the way that we host drop-in dinners. For one thing, we now have a cute young baby, who would not be so happy with dinners that last late into the night. So we decided to switch it up to brunch and to host less frequently. The second thing is that we really want to encourage others to host nights as well. Our big dream is that we inspire so many people that we develop a community in which at least one person is hosting a drop-in dinner every night so that there is always somewhere to go for good company. With the award money, we are trying to provide a little seed money as incentive for others to host events. We have asked our guests for their thoughts on what it means to cultivate a drop-in culture and we will fund at least 10 individuals to host a regular series that will hopefully inspire their guests to host as well.

These pictures are from a recent event – we collected books for prisoners. We ate good food, gathered over 300 quality books, and enjoyed lively debates about the literary merits of various books. Our challenge now is to think about the frequency of gatherings (to make it truly drop-in, we should be hosting every other week, but we’ve only been doing it monthly which makes it more of an “event” versus an informal get-together) and the number of people (at a recent event we had 35 people – which is vibrant and stimulating but we realize is too many to generate quality conversations and connections). So our conception of what a drop-in culture can be continues to evolve.

We’d love to hear your thoughts…

Last spring I received an award from Rediscover your Heart. I was so happy that I would be able to further my work with LinkEducation (my organization that helps parents and teachers in New York City to find education programs for their students).

Thanks to the Rediscover your Heart award we were able to hold our first Education Expo. It was an event that brought education programs (like art classes, yoga, after school programs, and tutoring) into one room so that parents could find programs for their kids, and so teachers and principals could find low cost or free programs to improve their school.

This first expo turned out to be a huge success! We co-hosted it with the New York City Department of Education, 300 parents and teachers attended, and had so many organizations who wanted to present that we ran out of room!

It was such a success that we are now going to do it twice a year! We have our next expo coming up this April 25th. We have a bigger space so we can now fit 100 booths, and we hope that even more parents and teachers will come this year.

Check out the information on our next expo here: http://www.linkeducation.org/spring_educationexpo

And check out pictures from our last expo here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/LinkEducation/AnnualEducationExpo

Threads That Teach aims to help fundraise for inner city public school arts education programs, specifically in New York City. Myself being a product of public school education going on to pursue a career in the arts, it is important to me that future generations have the same opportunities that I had. In recent years, the U.S. government has cut down on the educational budgets allotted for public school education. As a result of these budget cuts, the schools have began to focus more and more on academic subjects that are measured through standardized testing and have cut a significant amount of funding allotted to more creative courses. The arts programs in public schools are slowly shrinking and the resources available to students are less than adequate. The goal of the Threads That Teach Public School Program is to have the students attending these schools help restore their own arts programming budgets through fashion art fundraisers. We do this by bringing in volunteers from local colleges and universities to teach lesson plans covering fashion design, marketing, sales, money management, and entrepreneurship. Through these lessons students are able to create and sell apparel as a fundraiser for the arts program at their respective school.

The Rediscover Your Heart Award has provided our organization with the extra funding needed to expand our programming. This is our first semester operating in two schools at once. Each school has its own unique goal for the program, and thus we have designed two very different curriculums. At one school we are teaching our original curriculum in 3 general education and 2 special education visual arts classes. This curriculum has the students designing the artwork to be printed onto the apparel, but the printing process is then outsourced. At our second school we have created a more hands-on curriculum with a small group of after-school program participants. These students not only sketch the designs to be put onto the apparel, but they also create the apparel itself. Each item is hand-sewn and decorated by the students. This is a new type of curriculum that we would not have had the resources to experiment with if it were not for the Rediscover Your Heart Award. The students seem to really enjoy the complete process of sketching, sewing, and decorating the apparel. Our volunteers also find the change in programming to be refreshing and fun. One volunteer in particular has mentioned that the “arts and crafts type aspect” of the after-school projects make her “feel like a kid again.”

As our program continues to grow, my commitment to our mission only grows stronger. I am constantly working to revise our lesson plans through extensive research of innovative processes used in other educational programs to teach similar concepts. As our volunteer database expands, the recruitment process is getting easier due to anecdotes reporting positive experiences being passed along on college campuses. We recently even had a new school approach us with interest in participating in our program next fall. The visual arts teacher at the school heard about our program from a friend and contacted me via e-mail through our website. The self-promotion of our public school program is extremely motivating and I look forward to seeing how our organizational will grow and evolve over time.