Omaha Zoo Trip

This month 56 mentors and mentees suited up in our new pink and blue t-shirts and loaded onto a bus headed for Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo. Animal crackers, zoo themed fruit snacks, and a few movies kept us occupied during the ride.

Free entrance and lunch were provided once we arrived. With 11 different exhibits the zoo kept us busy and entertained. A few of the highlights included face painting, petting goats, the water mister (it was scorching hot!), and of course, seeing all of our favorite animals.

Mentor Iowa would like to give a special thanks to Variety, The Children's Charity of Iowa for sponsoring this event.

Principal Charity Golf Classic

Mentor Iowa is working with the Principal Charity Golf Classic with the Birdies for Charity program. It is a great deal and Mentor Iowa gets ALL of your donation plus we can receive additional funding too! Check out this website to learn more:


http://mentoriowa.org/birdies-for-charities.html

Grapevine

January 2011 marks the 10th annual observation of National Mentoring Month (NMM). NMM was started with the hope to raise awareness of mentoring in its various forms and to recruit individuals to become mentors.
On Thursday, February 17th, Mentor Iowa will host its own NMM celebration titled Grapevine, What have you heard about mentoring?. Grapevine is a dual-purpose event: 1) To recognize current Mentor Iowa mentors and volunteers for their contributions throughout the year. (All mentors and volunteers will receive a gift from Mentor Iowa for their many efforts to help the program.) 2) To recruit new individuals to learn more about the program and become mentors.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! In order to save marketing funds, we are going to do things a little different this year on getting the word out. We would like YOU to invite as many guests as you would like whom you think would be great mentors. For some fun, we are going to host a raffle. For every person you invite who attends the event, you will receive a raffle ticket. We will have a wide range of prizes including gift cards to restaurants, malls, convenience stores and whatever else we can arrange! The more people you invite, the more chances you have to win cool stuff! We also will have a raffle for the guests you bring as well!
Grapevine is free and open to the public. In addition to learning about wine and food pairings, attendees will be able to “pair up” with current Mentor Iowa volunteers to learn more about the program. The hope is that new mentors will get involved and reduce the number of children (75) currently on the waiting list. Food and wine will be provided at no cost.

Details
What: Mentor Iowa’s Fourth Annual Grapevine Event

When: Thursday, February 17th, 2011. 6:00 – 9:00 PM

Where: Sbrocco
208 Court Avenue
Des Moines

Free and open to the public. Attendees will engage in wine/food pairing education, while learning about the Mentor Iowa program and volunteer opportunities.

~Des Moines Art Center Activity~

This month Mentor Iowa visited the Des Moines Art Center. This has become a tradition and usually brings a large number of participants. Each year the Art Center staff come up with a new project to keep the kids and mentors busy.

This year everyone got a tour to start the day off. Mentors and mentees viewed several paintings by artist Edward Hopper. The tour guide had everyone pick out colors, shapes, and lighting that Edward uses in his pieces. After getting the artistic juices going everyone returned to the studio and created their very own cityscape using chalk (mentee's loved this) and pieces of colored paper.

It's amazing to have so many loud kids all become so quiet while they worked so hard on their master pieces.

We had over 30 participants for the event - SUCCESS!!! I wish we had pictures to put up but our camera unfortunately lost every picture we took:(