Dear Acknowledge Alliance family,
At the start of this new year, I want to wish you the absolute best for 2023 and share some of Acknowledge Alliance’s special accomplishments in 2022.
Since Acknowledge Alliance’s founding in 1994 (yes, 2023 marks our 29th anniversary!), we have been providing mental health services and resilience support in schools and community organizations that reach thousands of students and educators every year. Our staff are creating and reinforcing bonds that last a lifetime. Whether it’s through our Resilience Consultation Program, our Collaborative Counseling Program, or our intern training program, we are strengthening the teaching profession, disrupting the pipeline to prison, and training the next generation of mental health professionals.
How do we know this? We have data! In 2022, we reached nearly 3,000 students and over 600 educators, and trained 6 mental health interns. Anecdotally, I can vouch for this too. We’ve heard from so many teachers, students and interns about lives transformed, burn-out prevented and the exceptional quality of our training program.
93% of our students who may have been on a probation track are instead in the process of graduating.
86% of the educators we work with are using our strategies to promote their own resilience, like setting boundaries and recognizing their own strengths.
100% of interns agreed that our training helped them develop new clinical skills
Behind the scenes, I found that our staff and board work needed to be further centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values, so that we can continue to do better in the DEI space. To this end, I invested in building a more representative Board and staff, and am ensuring DEI principles continue to guide our strategic plan and continuous learning at the agency. With help from grant-funded DEI consultants, I was encouraged to continue to advocate for transparency in salaries, pay equity, and open paths to leadership for staff and board members who bring diverse perspectives – from BIPOC folks to the LGBTQ+ community, to people with disabilities and neuro-divergent folks. We launched a staff-led Inclusion Task Force – a working group charged with moving the needle on DEI at our organization. The task force members will rotate every six months, and in just two iterations, have accomplished so much:
operationalizing our values
planning staff and board training
updating our employee handbook and performance reviews
and many other exciting projects
Serving on the boards of other nonprofits is deepening my connection to the nonprofit ecosystem, giving me fruitful ideas for my work at the agency and opportunities to collaborate. I am thrilled that I was asked to join the Board of the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits’ (CEN) in June 2022. I was also honored to be President of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), Silicon Valley Chapter’s Board of Directors.
Like many other nonprofits, we carefully returned to in-person events in 2022. We had our annual agency all-staff retreat at Campo di Bocce in Los Gatos, where we enjoyed being together after 2 years of Zoom retreats. And, we were so excited about the agency’s Community Open House event, our first in-person gathering since 2019! Held on a beautiful October evening in our office courtyard, it was a wonderful opportunity to showcase our programs, and thank our staff, donors and Board.
2022 was also a year of feeling honored: we were 1 of only 10 local nonprofits to participate in a cohort training created by Jim Morgan, founder of Applied Materials, and we were selected to partner with BoardLead, a selective board-matching organization available to successful nonprofits at no cost through a competitive application process.
In 2023, we will continue to grow and expand our efforts as we move into the new year, advancing our core values of integrity, inclusion, relationships, and collaboration, and celebrating the diversity – and the strength born from that diversity – of our community. In doing so, we hope to further the connections that foster relationships.
As I like to say, there is a magic to this special agency, and I want to assure you of your belonging in this exceptional Acknowledge Alliance family that we share. We know that relationships and community connection are at the heart of our mission, and we are all stronger together.
I wish you and your loved ones health and peace in the new year.
Sharon Navarro
Executive Director
P.S. Every year I adopt a New Year’s resolution and this year it is self-care – for all of us. What resolution(s) have you adopted for 2023? Let me know!