Strategic Plan blah, blah, blah?

MISSION

Enhancing life and learning for students.

VISION

All students will have opportunities to expand their creative potential and critical life skills.

VALUES

As stewards who act with integrity, respect and transparency, our work is guided by:

COMMUNITY

We believe that students should have equitable access to the opportunities that we provide and, through community support, we strive to remove financial barriers that keep them from fully engaging in school life.

CREATIVITY

We believe that the future requires creativity and a commitment to learning and deeper understanding. We aspire to be creative in the work that we do and to inspire creativity in students.

COLLABORATION

We believe in the value of working with others and achieving together what may not be possible alone. Along with our education and community partners, we aspire to bring a collaborative spirit and strategy to all that we do so that students may be more fully served.

COURAGE

We believe that skills are as important as knowledge and that the arts are fundamentally invaluable in creating a whole person. We aspire to be courageous by speaking about their critical importance and to boldly innovate new ways of expanding the impact of our ‘hands-on’ approach to learning.

Tomorrow Yearns for Risk and Imagination

In order of importance, the Foundation’s purpose is this:

  • to level the playing field for kids;
  • to eliminate barriers that keep them from engaging in school life and with their peers and then, with these basic human needs met;
  • provide hands-on learning experiences over-and-above standard curriculum and, in so doing:
  • bring all students to the meeting point between their natural aptitude and personal passion – a place where they discover and do a thing they love and in doing it they feel like they’re most authentic selves.

Like author Sir Ken Robinson, we believe that it’s crucial that a child finds this, not simply because it will make them more fulfilled but because, “as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions depend on it”.

And behind all our grants, assistance, workshops and programming, our underlying message to kids will always be to hold fast to what they inherently bring with them at the start of their school careers – “sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.”

If they do that, they will make the difference we need in the world.

Executive Director, LW Wes MacVicar

Ego or Calling…What’s Guiding You?

Black and White Photo of women scratching her head in disbeliefDear Students (and the rest of us), we highly recommend this article:

5 Ways to Distinguish Your Calling From Your Ego BY SHELLEY PREVOST

Your ego and your “calling” in life can look surprisingly similar. Both pull you toward the realization of your desires. Both can completely consume your waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours with frenetic thoughts and sparks of brilliance. They can also manifest very similar outcomes–money, fame, and power. And they can both leave you feeling exhausted.

Ego is necessary and important because it does the work to assemble your personality. It manages your fragile identity while you figure out who you are. It protects you from the onslaught of societal expectations and motivates you to work hard and achieve great things.

But ego alone can also skew you toward thinking that hard work and achievement are the goals in life.
If your ego is what assembles your personality and manages your identity, then your calling is invested in making sure it’s authentic–who you really are–not just a persona you show the world.

Here are some ways to decipher which one is really driving your work.

Ego fears not having or doing something. Calling fears not expressing or being something.
The lifeblood of the ego is fear. Its primary function is to preserve your identity, but it fears your unworthiness. As a result, ego pushes you harder in order to achieve more. Ego communicates to you through “oughts,” “musts,” and “shoulds,” persuading you to believe that by achieving more and more, you must be worthy, right?

A calling expresses itself quietly, through the expression of subtle clues throughout your life. It is unconcerned with you attaining or accomplishing anything. Its primary function is to be a conduit for expressing your true self to the world. What you DO with that expression is less important.

Ego needs anxiety to survive. Calling needs silence to survive.
Ego not only breeds on anxiety, it requires anxiety in order to decide which aspects of your personality will be dominant, and which ones will be dormant.

Wherever you feel the most insecurity is where your ego will work overtime to “fix.” The ego needs anxiety to pinpoint the problem, then course corrects by disavowing this pesky aspect of your personality. Unfortunately, what the ego finds annoying or disruptive can also be your greatest gift to the world.

A calling, on the other hand, is discovered through observation and reflection, which is rarely found in a noisy environment. Listening to your life and discovering what it’s Continue reading