Featured Image: Tyla Tolbert, CAN's Associate Director of Bryant Educational Programs, handing out backpacks and school supplies at Bryant's Back-To-School BBQ

Back to School Events at CAN

Top Left: Families at Arrowwood selecting their backpacks! / Top Right: Shelby and Shayna posing at Brick 

Bottom Left: Londynn picking out books at Hikone / Gio posing with his backpack at Hikone!

Our back-to-school events this year were an absolute blast! Each of our communities gathered together for good food, mingling, and of course backpacks and school supplies for each student! Some of the highlights included free books from Books for Kids, the Kona Ice truck at Bryant, a dunk tank and bounce houses at Arrowwood, tons of resource tables across all of our events, lots of games, and so much more!

Thanks to our amazing donors, we were able to distribute backpacks full of school supplies to... (drum roll please!!!)

530+ Washtenaw County Students 

That means each of those students will start the school year with pencils, folders, binders, rulers, notebooks, highlighters, erasers (and MORE!) in hand and ready to learn! Plus our community centers are stocked with supplies to ensure these students have what they need throughout the school year too!

Thank you to our donors and volunteers!

Left: Colette (CAN) and Connie (FCC) / Center: Joel (DTE) / Right: Jean McKee with a trunk full of school supplies!

Thank you, thank you, thank you to....

Black Men Read

Yodit Johnson

Lihn Song

The Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation

Lisa Lemble

First Baptist Church

The First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor

DTE

The City of Ann Arbor

Verizon

Russell Sheppard

U of M Dept. of Astronomy & Dept. of Statistics

Mo Brennan

Ann Arbor YMCA

Michigan Medicine

Element

St. Clare's Episcopal Church

We couldn't have done it without you!

Left: Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation volunteering with CAN to assemble backpacks! / Bottom: Faye (CAN) with Simon (DTE) / Right: Cheryl (DTE) 

Bryant Community Clean-up

Featured Image: Bryant's community clean-up crew!

Our Bryant Community Center partnered up with The City of Ann Arbor this year for the Bryant Community Clean-up event! The purpose of the event is to bring the community together and encourage neighbors to get rid of any unwanted items that are otherwise difficult to dispose of. Each summer, CAN brings in multiple large dumpsters to make it all happen. This year, we added a twist to our usual event and invited everyone in the neighborhood to set out their unwanted items early to allow for others to repurpose them! 

CAN's Annual Management Retreat

Featured Image: CAN's Management Team (in rainbow order!)

This month, CAN management staff participated in our annual management retreat. With 7 sites, it is not all that often our entire management team is in one place. Each year, we all come together for a couple days and do some very important work which includes some reflection on the year behind us, some staff bonding activities, and mostly planning and goal-setting for the year to come! This year, we focused on our mission, reviewed our strategic plan, discussed some updates, and spent a lot of time honing in on how we can best serve our communities in the next year. We also managed to grab a group photo (this year's theme was rainbow!) and we were only missing two team members, Valerie Muthuswami (our Director of Volunteers) and Montana Crowell (our Grants Specialist)!