LaSalle Catholic Receives Two Grants for Early Childhood Faith Formation

People sometimes ask what school administrators do all summer at work.  Certainly not all of the administrative work is particularly exciting, since our beloved  teachers and students are away for ten weeks.  A lot of the summer work is simply related to maintaining our program through items that cannot be addressed during the school year.  In some cases, though, we get to invest in new opportunities that not only sustain our program but strengthen it into the future.  Such is the case with regard to two grants that we wrote this summer and are receiving this fall.  Our middle school counselor, Katherine Sterline, and I wrote two grants to help strengthen our school through faith formation opportunities for very young children and their families.  

The first grant we received is from the Burns Donovan Foundation in the amount of $6,000!  This grant is to further develop our Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program (CGS).  CGS is an incredible program for helping young people to enhance their personal relationships with Jesus Christ and also to better understand our faith from a historical and liturgical perspective.  It uses a Montessori approach that allows students to explore their faith and relationship with Jesus in a somewhat child-determined pace.  We have offered it for over two years and have seen fruits for sure.  The funds will allow us to train more catechists and to provide more hands-on opportunities for children in the atrium at school.

The second grant is from the Catholic Foundation of the Archdiocese of Dubuque (CFAD) in the amount of $4,610.  This grant is to initiate an Early Catholic Family Life (ECFL) program at LaSalle Catholic.  This grant provides the funding to train leaders and provide necessary materials to start up the program.  This program gathers families with very young children (babies, toddlers, etc.) an opportunity to meet, talk, and share the experience of their early family faith journey.  Families drop off children in the kids’ room with other adults there to play with the kids, so the adults from the family can participate in guided conversations about young family fath life.  In other cities where this program has been offered, parishes are seeing that couples have become more active and involved in their church community after marriage and baptism, and that young families are feeling more equipped to grow as a family of faith supported by other similar families.

LaSalle Catholic is elated to have received such generous grants, and we cannot wait to put these gracious gifts to great use to further advance our mission in partnership with families and parishes.