Message from Founder & Chairman/CEO Connor J. Archer

Greetings Courageous Steps Supporters / Partners, 

It has been a busy first 6 months of 2022, with lots of growth occurring. It truly has been a busy stretch for our organization and will continue to be busy for the foreseeable future. Here are just some highlights from the past few months: 

Green House Village Preschool: Our largest program is about to add more services to better support our children (and families). Through expanding our offerings, we will be able to support more families and extend their programming options to better serve their specific needs. This is just the beginning of some exciting changes we plan to be implementing for the remainder of 2022. 

Courageous Steps also received a $7500 grant for the Green House Village Preschool which will benefit programming throughout the remainder of 2022. 

Operation Find Me: Courageous Steps received a $1,000 grant through the Walmart Foundation to continue its' work on expanding the initiative into the Hancock county region. This will occur over the next few months. More plans are in the works to help expand into other regions of Maine. Our initiative website is also going through an upgrade so please be patient as we work through this update. 

One Word Challenge: The students of Marshwood Middle School completed their One Word Challenge which was the first One Word Challenge since 2019. Thank you to the students and staff for being our first school in Southern Maine to participate in this impactful initiative. You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZE1EjlCoZk

Wishlist Initiative: The Courageous Steps Project has awarded several donations to schools / organizations through our Wishlist Initiative this year. We were able to award donations to Unified Basketball programs that participated in our March festival, and also approved many requests submitted on our website. 

Scholarship Fund: Courageous Steps recently awarded nearly $2,000 in scholarships to graduating high school seniors from Old Town High School and Foxcroft Academy. Congratulations to Logan Gardner of Old Town High School and Connor Plante from Foxcroft Academy for receiving scholarships. It is a pleasure to continue awarding scholarships to support the next steps of our scholars. 

Events: We've had a very productive spring season of events. Thank you to those that have supported our events in 2022, many of which have returned after a 2 year hiatus due to COVID-19. We have our 2nd Annual Golf Scramble coming up on Monday July 11th, and our 9th Annual Back-To-School Drive coming up on Wednesday August 3rd. In addition, we have our Costumes & Cocktails Halloween event returning on Saturday October 29th. You can find more details on all these events on our website. 

Future Growth: I have been working aggressively with our team to continue finding ways we can grow and respond to the needs of those in our communities. With the impacts of COVID-19 really starting to come to the forefront, it is more important that we do what we can to support the expansion of programming and services to better support children and young adults with various abilities and challenges. In the coming months, I will be announcing major steps we are taking to support these efforts. 

Connecting with Connor: Starting this summer, I will be doing more to reach out to families of children and young adults in our communities to learn more about how we as an organization can respond to their needs. A series of free webinars and/or discussions will take place for the remainder of 2022. As always, you can reach out to me via email at: connor@thecourageousstepsproject.org. 

---