Foundation Blog

For $3 Million - What will we get?

Thursday, 20 December 2012 16:47

When I was going through some files in the ECSA Foundation Office recently, I stumbled upon a fund drive package from 1944. It caught my attention because the rendering of the building on the front cover of the "propaganda" piece drawn by architect Carl Kemm Loven was very futuristic and beautifully designed as the proposed new Midland Park Christian School Building.

Keep in mind that this all took place during World War II when many local Midland Park fathers were involved in the war effort both at home and abroad. Not what you would call an ideal time to try to raise funds to buy land and build a new school facility. The organizers decided to move ahead as there were indications that the war was winding down and the fathers and bread winners would soon be home and would be thinking about a Christian Education for their children once again. They felt that the present facility with an enrollment of 144 students was not going to be adequate for long, so they began to plan for the future.

The appeal was to raise $50,000 during a 5 day blitz with Midland Park parents during the last week of September 1944. (The CPI Inflation calculator indicates that the $50,000 appeal of 1944 is the equivalent of a $654,037 campaign in 2012.) They estimated that if all parents participated and gave an average of $200 per family, they would achieve their objective. What is most interesting is that the Mayor of Midland Park wrote a letter to all the residents urging them to help with this drive because if the Christian School closed and the students went to the local Public Schools, they would have a major space crisis on their hands requiring a costly emergency building program.

We don't know the outcome of this initiative. Perhaps they did not raise the funds, as a new Midland Park Christian School, based totally on a new set of plans, was built in 1966--- 22 years after this appeal for funds.

Here we are in 2012, committed to raising $3Million dollars primarily to upgrade the Midland Park Elementary School. This is a major undertaking for Eastern Christian, but a very necessary one to maintain our facilities as a highly desirable place of learning for our students.

Our current appeal will be to the entire supporting constituency, not just to Midland Park parents, but the level of individual support will obviously have to be considerably higher than it was in 1944 in order for us to complete the necessary improvements.

We will be setting up a page on our website dedicated to this campaign and forward information on the building progress and fund drive progress to you through that venue and through the printed page. We are excited about the project and are committed to getting this project completed by the end of the summer of 2014. In the meantime we are beginning to discuss personal and corporate support for this project so that we can deliver a much more efficient building, with a 21st Century look.

We pray that with God's blessing on this campaign and the generous support of the Christian School Community, we will reach our goal.

We hope that we can count on you when you are called for your support!

Garret G. Nieuwenhuis
Executive Director, Foundation for Eastern Christian

What a difference a year makes!

Friday, 06 January 2012 12:36

As I sat down to write this blog I was reminded of the lines from a song that Dinah Washington sang during the years that I attended EC. Others of my generation will also recall her clear beautiful voice as she sang " What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours". Those lines have been repeated by so many over the years and made to apply to a host of situations in people's personal lives as well as in their professional lives.

While things in fact do change from day to day at Eastern Christian, I took the liberty to modify the phrase to differences within the span of a year as we typically compare events on a year to year basis. This past year was like no other in our history as we embarked on a number of initiatives to make the school better, to be funded on a more sustained basis and to make it a place of learning throughout the entire year.

Many readers are familiar with our installation of solar panels on all three school buildings this past year, effectively eliminating our regular electric bills and creating a sustainable cash flow to retire the debts we took on with the installation of the panels.

We have completed the first year of operations at ditto, our upscale resale store in North Haledon. The results for the first year were beyond expectations and enabled ditto to donate $75,000 of the sale proceeds to Eastern Christian and to establish itself as the place to shop in the local area.

In order to fully utilize our facilities on a 12 moth basis, we established a EC Camps program for all ages and interests. Even though this past summer was our first venture into a program of this type, it was both successful and profitable.

We are not resting on our laurels as we have 3 other business ventures under consideration and in the planning stage for the next school year. We sincerely believe that these new initiatives will enhance the learning experience of the students who will be a part of these programs. These new programs will be open to community students as well as EC students as we strive to make our mark as a strong community partner in education. Final details of these new programs will be released as they are completed.

What all this means is that we are very focused on the need for affordable Christian Education, and to the extent that these business ventures add to the bottom line, we are able to keep tuition as affordable as possible.

We are looking forward to 2012 as a year of increased opportunities for service, for additional innovative ways to support Christian Education and for your continued support by giving of your time, talent and treasure.

These are both challenging times and exciting times for Eastern Christian School. Together we can make a difference and keep Christian Education very visible and achievable in the North Jersey Area!

Garret G. Nieuwenhuis ' 58

Executive Director

Foundation for Eastern Christian School Assn.

A Season for Giving and a Reason for Giving

Thursday, 29 September 2011 10:50

The summer is past, vacations are a memory and school has resumed where it left off in June. There are new faces in the faculty rooms of our school and new students in the classrooms; all of them making up the fabric of what we call Eastern Christian School.

In the administrative offices we are once again busy with schedules and bulletins, financial reports and board reports. Not to be forgotten are the fundraising activities and reports that are so critical to the everyday needs of the school. Year after year we work diligently to raise the funds required to support the needs of the school. Tuition currently covers approximately 70% of those needs, with the remainder to come from a variety of events and programs that we initiate each year.

In order to meet the school's financial needs, we have embarked on the 2011-2012 ECSA Annual Fund Drive with a Business Drive to follow in October and then a Year End Appeal in December. The list of events goes on well into 2012. All of us as parents, grandparents, friends and alumni will be asked to do our part. Some will be able to give in abundance, while others will not be able to spare much for these appeals, however all gifts, regardless of size, are needed and appreciated. Beyond financial giving is the need for your support and participation in school events by volunteering as you are able. Whether in school, after school or at ditto, your help is vital to the well being of our school. Above all, we need and covet your daily, faithful prayer support for our school.

Please give these matters your prayerful consideration as we embark on the 2011-2012 school year. It would be sincerely appreciated if many who read this message would respond generously as God has blessed them, to help Eastern Christian School. God has richly blessed us with such a great heritage—let's do our part to keep that heritage alive and well for future generations!

Submitted by Garret G. Nieuwenhuis, Exec. Dir. Foundation for Eastern Christian School.

September, 2011

Planning for the Future

Tuesday, 28 June 2011 10:33

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not harm you,

plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

Planning for the future, whether it be for ourselves or for our business or an organization we belong to, is a very difficult assignment. While we all would like to think that we are in control of everything, the fact of the matter is we are not! No matter what we would like to accomplish at any given time, there is no certainty that it will happen as we planned. As we all know, there is a Higher Authority that controls all of our life, and He knows best what we need and when we need it.

Understanding this to be the case, how then should we plan for our tomorrows or the next school year? At Eastern Christian, much like at any other business, there are things that need to be done in advance in order to accomplish our goals and objectives. This is not only a good business decision, but also a practical one. In most cases we step out in faith, anticipating that things will work out as we planned.

Planning is a large part of our summer activities at Eastern Christian. Some of us are already planning for the new school year; some are planning for the arrival of a new high school principal; some are working on a sound financial plan for the year, and others are planning for the operational needs of the school in the immediate future. On any given day, there may be three or four separate meetings to plan—planning for today, tomorrow and beyond.

In the Foundation office we are busy planning for the fundraising needs to support the school in the coming year—not an easy task these days, but one that requires proper planning and direction. We need to be prepared to support the school budget with nearly $1,400,000 in funds raised from sources other than tuition. We have been busy analyzing some of our recent fundraising events and have decided that some of the previous year's events simply did not produce the desired results and should be dropped from our list of events. These are difficult decisions, because we need to find alternative events that will produce the desired results in support of the budget. Fortunately, we have a number of Foundation Board members who have a creative mind and are willing to work with new ideas and suggestions in order to sustain the support levels the school requires. What this means for our supporters is that you may be asked to support fewer events during the new school year; however, your support of the "EC Signature Events" will be critical to the financial health of the school.

For your information, we are listing the 2011-2012 Signature Events so that you will be aware of their existence and approximately when we will solicit your support for them. As the year progresses, you will be hearing and seeing more information about these Signature Events.

2011-201 Signature Events

August 20, 2011 Annual Fund Drive
October 21, 2011 Annual Sports Boosters Golf Outing
November 4, 2011 Annual Scholarship Dinner
January 25, 2012 Annual Sports Boosters Beefsteak
April 19, 2012 Annual Auction Gala
May 21, 2012 Annual EC Golf Outing

The details of these events and other fundraising initiatives will be communicated via the EC Web site, home bulletins, EC Times and any other media that reaches our supporters. We sincerely hope that we can count on your participation and support once again.

We not only covet your support, but the future financial health of our school depends on it. This is your school and mine, so please join me and many others with your strong support and above all your fervent prayers for Eastern Christian School.

What is the best way to reach you?

Monday, 31 January 2011 17:47

Those of us who have been in the fundraising business for a while are almost afraid to ask that question these days as we may be asked to use some newly developed technology that we are still unfamiliar with. I get a kick out of the commercial showing the cook in a large commercial kitchen communicating with someone using empty soup cans connected by a string. As youngsters, we all tried that method as it seemed like such a novel and innovative idea then. Little would we know that just a few short decades later, the way we communicate would change so many times in so many ways.

Most of my generation grew up with the telephone, albeit a party line with several neighbors sharing the same line. So much for secrets and confidentiality in those days. We went from dial phones to touchtone, then to caller ID and then call waiting. The changes kept coming, but little did we know what lay ahead of us.

It wasn't too many years ago that we agonized over the expenditure of $500.00 during a Eastern Christian Finance Committee meeting to purchase a Fax Machine—the end all in the field of communication (so we were told). Today fewer and fewer fax machines are sold, giving way to the technology of scanning documents in to your computer.

The predecessor of the cell phone for many was the car phone, a bulky arrangement that essentially looked like your home telephone installed on the dashboard of your car. In addition to costing around $1200.00, it took an entire day to install this unit at a designated telephone service center. While it had some limitations you could clearly see that this was the beginning of something big in the communications arena. Little did we know how big and how soon things would change.

Just when a simple cell phone seemed to satisfy most of us, we were introduced to touch screen, email, chat, photo and even video games. Add to this the tremendous advances with the internet through DSL, cable and satellite allowing us to send messages, photos, documents and other important files via email. How about On Line Chat? What a novel idea! We should not forget the added benefits of voice and video capabilities through microphones and webcams. The list goes on and on and the technology keeps changing and improving.

How many times have you been in a meeting or in someone's company recently where people were texting or reading/sending messages on their Blackberry or similar device? And then there are the social networks of Facebook, Twitter and others as well as the surge in the business contacts obtained via Linkedin. It is truly amazing how much change has taken place during our lifetime in the field of communication, and I think it is safe to say that this trend will continue, perhaps even faster than we have witnessed so far.

What does all of this have to do with Eastern Christian and you? Very simply, a lot! We are constantly seeing that our donors are requesting less paper and more communication via the latest and the greatest means of communicating. Our dilemma is that we have a multi- generational constituency and not all have the same level of familiarity with today's technology, something we have to keep in mind as we contact you on behalf of Eastern Christian. Accordingly we still use many of the tried and true methods of contact such as letters, phone calls and visits. To date that has served us well, however we can't ignore the fact that future generations will deal with us very differently and we have to be prepared for that eventuality. Today many of us use the best technology available to do our jobs. Many of us can work from our homes or from distant locations by using the technology available to us. For all intents and purposes, many of us are easily available 24/7 allowing for the resolution of many issues without a hitch or delay. In a way it is mind boggling to think that technology has created significant amounts of efficiencies but it also has the potential to remove the personal touch we have all come to expect, especially when it comes to asking for your financial support.

Our policy at Eastern Christian has been and continues to be to respect and use the available technology where applicable but never at the expense of personal contact where that is more appropriate. We hope you agree.