Although we ended sooner than expected, the Center still had over 6 months of programs and memories this school year, so we decided to put together a slideshow for everyone to see how much the kids mean to us! Click here to watch!
The mission and vision of the MYC is to work together with other community organizations to provide resources and opportunities for youth to make healthy decisions. The MYC works to provide local youth with the necessary activities and events that help them develop physically, mentally, socially and emotionally through their adolescent years. By providing Milford youth with these types of programs and a safe environment during the after-school hours and during our monthly events, we hope to address adolescent risk factors as well as promoting the partnership among community members to ensure a comprehensive vision and plan for the health of the youth in the town of Milford.
For this reason, we would like to thank all the families and volunteers who helped make our 2019-2020 After School Program such a success! We had over 490 registered After School members this year even with our doors closing to the public in March. We were also still able to offer over 35 different programs with help from our volunteers, staff and community partners! Some programs included boxing, fishing, knitting, gardening, nutrition, homework help, STEAM and Martial Arts, just to name a few! We even created over 90 virtual programs to allow our community access to different activities while we had to keep our doors closed during the COVID-19 stay at home order. Even when we could not have the kids in our building, we decided to create a way to celebrate them even at home! Starting in April we were able to deliver over 50 youth gifts provided by Amazon donations and the United Way of Tri-County‘s “Project Toy Box.” We wouldn’t have been able to achieve this without the help of the Milford Police Department and the High Department, who helped us with gift giving parades to our members’ homes to help bring joy where we could.
We would also like to thank our over 100 after school volunteers for this year, hundreds more through our events, as well as all of our community partners! For example, we couldn’t run many of our fitness programs without the support of the Milford Regional Medical Center! The Milford Regional Medical Center funds the instructors for our programs, like POUND, Cardio Dance Jam and Fit Camp! We also served over 445 nutritional snacks, which is provided to members who participate in any of our physical fitness and/or nutritional programs.
The Milford Youth Center is also so grateful and pleased to partner with Teacher’s Driving Academy, who offers students a great program, at a reasonable price! We are very grateful for this partnership and the very appreciative of the estimated annual donation of over $20,000 each year, helping us to run a free after school program for the youth of Milford!The Center also is able to offer a free snack and dinner to all after school members, due to the collaboration of CACFP Hockomock Area YMCA, Milford Area Humanitarian Coalition and the Milford School Food & Nutrition Services department! Due to this partnership, we have served over 9,390 dinners and snacks during this year’s After-School program!
A huge thank you to Milford TV for continuously collaborating with us and helping us turn our entire After-School program into a virtual one. We could not have done any of our continued programming without your assistance! We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Milford TV during the Virtual Community Telethon set for July 10th!Without all of our community support we would not have achieved this! We are so excited for our After-school program to grow with new volunteers and programs and can’t wait to see what new and returning programs we offer next school year! Thank you everyone!