On Friday, January 26th the Milford Youth Center partnered with The Way Church and Milford Public Schools to host a “Find Yourself Friday” event for youth and their parents. The events were common for the youth center in the past and we are all very excited to bring these Friday nights back to the community of Milford. By hosting these, “Find Yourself Friday” parties we hope to inspire youth to have fun in a safe, accepting atmosphere where they are encouraged to be themselves. The Way Church hosted a video game tournament as part of the Find Yourself Friday while Milford Public Schools hosted a social media workshop for parents upstairs.
The video game tournament attracted some new youth center members while the, “Digital Did You Know,” workshop informed parents about internet and media safety. We always like to add a charitable aspect to these events. For this Find Yourself Friday, we have been collecting gently used and new suitcases, duffel bags and backpacks for the Treehouse Foundation. The Treehouse Foundation is a foster care organization that “aims to inspire, implement and support innovative child welfare practices to ensure children who experience foster care find forever families and supportive communities, empowering them to lead fulfilling, productive lives.” Throughout January and during this event we have collected more than fifty of these items combined. Typically, when children enter the foster care system they only have trash bags to handle and transport their belongings. There is a need for sustainable storage of items for these children and we are grateful for all of the kind and generous donations as well as support for this cause.
We want to thank The Way Church and Milford Public Schools for planning this event with us. We would also like to thank volunteers from The Way Church as well as Milford Public Schools faculty and staff volunteers. Also, we would like to thank DCU Franklin, MYCYC Vice President, Taylor Smith, Joanna Abrantes and John and Darlene Dulude for creating beautiful baskets for our raffle prizes. We would also like to thank all of our wonderful MYC volunteers who helped out during this event including our youth council volunteers. We would also like to thank Milford TV for filming our event. Thank you to everyone who allowed us to borrow televisions, gaming consoles and games for our event. Also, thank you to everyone who participated and made a donation to the Treehouse Foundation! We hope to see you all for our next Find Yourself Friday event! We had about 60 wonderful kids and 40 wonderful volunteers participate in this event!