Updates from Looking Glass
The 8th annual Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures breakfast was forced to go virtual this year along with so many other typically in-person gatherings but still drove a lot of donations and community support as well as providing inspiring stories of the amazing work done by Looking Glass staff and volunteers.
The 2nd annual Looking Glass Socktoberfest sock donation drive was another huge success thanks to amazing local business partners and their store customers as well as generous Amazon wish list buyers who shipped packages of new socks to our admin office. We received thousands of new and gently used socks for our New Roads homeless youth drop-in center!
Unity of the Valley began an outreach to Looking Glass Residential Services in November 2019. They provide a weekly celebration service based on the outline of Youth of Unity (Y.O.U.) meetings. Prayer shawls are provided to all participants and some of their family members. Since the end of June, Unity of the Valley has also provided an evening Zoom Prayer time when the teens are able to connect one-on-one with a chaplain.
The Eugene River Road Grocery Outlet staff and patrons once again helped raise crucial funds for Looking Glass youth and programs through their annual Independence From Hunger campaign in July. Including a donation from the corporate group, the donation this year was just under $11,000!
The annual Looking Glass “Looking Forward, Giving Back,” event for 2020 is in the books and by all measures it was a resounding success. The 007-James-Bond-themed event was quite a hit, providing fun for roughly 250 supporters who helped raise crucial funds for Looking Glass at-risk youth & family services.
A local family with an annual tradition of coming together to collectively donate to a local nonprofit took it upon themselves to outfit every single Looking Glass residential bed with new sheets and pillows this holiday season. The Floyd family, whose annual tradition of giving goes back several years, decided to support Looking Glass this year.
The 2019 Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures breakfast fundraiser for Looking Glass, held on Tuesday November 12th at Venue 252, highlighted the magnitude of programs and services Looking Glass offers while showcasing the variety of education programs offered and from keynote speaker LaMonte Morgan focusing the effort of the community to invest in youth as preventative work.
On a chilly fall Eugene day in early October, New Roads Runaway & Homeless Youth Services Manager James Ewell posed for a photo opp taken by a Register-Guard reporter showing a sad and mostly empty bin of socks at the New Roads clothing closet which showed the current supply of socks offered to youth being at about 10 or so pairs. By the end of “Socktoberfest” the first ever month-long coordinated sock donation drive for Looking Glass, the challenge became finding storage for all the newly received socks - more than 7,000 pairs of socks were donated and they’re still coming in.
The 2nd annual Looking Glass Paddle Battle ping pong (or table tennis, if you take it seriously) tournament held Saturday, Sept 28th at the YMCA in Eugene was a huge success, raising north of $5,000 for Looking Glass programs and providing 50 participants the opportunity to help at-risk youth while having a lot of fun. In addition to trophies for each bracket winner (singles, doubles in both pro and amateur levels), raffle prizes were awarded and yummy grilled cheese sandwiches sustained the group throughout the day thanks to the Franz Grilled Cheese Machine.
Members of Looking Glass staff and their family and friends volunteered to staff an ice cream booth, generously donated by Stepping Stone Program Supervisor Scott Wilson and his family, at this year’s Oktoberfest event in Mt. Angel. The event only allows non-profits to run the food booths and Scott’s family arranged for some German-themed modifications to be made on their booth as well as towing it up there and supplying the inventory at wholesale cost. The four day event (which draws annual crowds of over 300,000 people to the 3,500 person town) generated more than $11,000 for Looking Glass!
