2022-2023 Annual Report
OUTCOMES | PARTNERSHIPS | DEMOGRAPHICS | FINANCIALS | SABBATICALS
Launch Leading the Charge
Despite living through a year of ‘post-pandemic’ and all of the challenges and stress associated with it, we’re so proud of the way our students, families, staff, and supporters came together to make 2022-23 a successful year.
Launch has had a busy year of change as well. In June of 2023, Launch’s CEO, Dr. Angela Griffin, departed the organization, and is now the CEO at Byrd Barr Place. The Board of Directors entered into a search for our next Executive Director, and during this process, we are pleased to have Mari Offenbecher as Interim Executive Director. During Dr. Griffin’s tenure, she successfully launched and completed a strategic planning process, resulting in a 5-year plan that will serve as a guide for the work we do in the future. You can view information about the plan here: launchlearning.org/about/strategic-plan.
This past year, Launch was able to continue serving our community and even expand our services and partnerships. We were able to do this despite having a sizable budget deficit during 2022-23, thanks to the outpouring of support from our community, including our families, staff, donors, funders, partners, and volunteers. Thank you for helping make our work possible!
Launch served nearly 700 students in 22-23, and while still tackling the challenges of the pandemic, we were able to increase the depth of our services and make a significant impact on students and families, including:
- Providing enrichment, social-emotional learning, and additional support services as needed
- Supporting families by continuing tuition assistance support to families in need
- Partnering with organizations like Youth in Focus, Double Dutch Divas, The Seattle Audubon Society, Big World Breaks, Seattle Children’s Theatre and so many others to provide engaging enrichment activities
And most importantly, Launch was a safe place for kids to just be kids, play, make friends, and have fun.
As you’ll see in this report, the pandemic has still had a huge impact on children’s social-emotional skills, mental health, and well-being. Despite this, we’re working to ensure that children and families don’t just survive the post-pandemic world, but thrive in it. Thank you again for being a vital part of our community of support for children and families.
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The Launch Board of Directors
Our Mission
Lead the charge to brilliant outcomes for the children of our community by ensuring equitable access to the highest quality learning and care.
Our Work
Founded in 1977 by a group of families who simply wanted a safe, nurturing place for their children to go after school, Launch serves more than 1,000 children every year through our early learning, before & after school, and summer programs for ages 3-12. A core focus of our work is to ensure that all children have equitable access to high-quality, enriching programs. We are also expanding our services to the caretakers and parents of infants to ensure that families in our community are fully equipped to raise a happy, healthy child.
Our vision is to create a world in which a young person’s race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, first language, religion, or ability does not affect their outcomes.
Outcomes
Preschool
76% were kindergarten-ready (met/exceeded widely held expectations in all 6 domains) in spring 2023. Only 46% were kindergarten-ready in fall 22.
3rd – 5th Grade
Our Partnerships
Partnerships are central to Launch’s approach to serving young people. We believe wholeheartedly that we are strongest when we come together as a community in support of the children and families we serve. During the 2022-23 fiscal year, we launched a partnership with Coyote Central, Double Dutch Divas, and SPIN (STEM Paths Innovation Network), thanks to funding from King County’s Best Starts for Kids.
Through our Bright Futures Collaborative, we work with our partners to provide elementary students at our Beacon Hill, Madrona, and Maple programs with fun and engaging enrichment activities including double dutch jump rope, robotics and coding, art and more. Each of our partners has a specific programming focus, which has resulted in our young students having access to a broad range of enrichment activities. As the lead partner, Launch hosts our partners at our after school program spaces and organizes logistics.
The goal of this collaborative is to provide fun STEM, creative arts, and physical fitness programming to students who might otherwise not have access to these kinds of services. Not only does this partnership help young people learn new skills and explore different possibilities, but it also helps build social-emotional skills like confidence, resilience, and self-esteem.
During our first year working together, we served over 130 youth, with an average of more than 90 students attending programming daily.
The impact of this partnership goes beyond the students – our partners have also been incredibly successful in engaging families in the program. It’s not unusual for a parent to come pick their child up and end up double dutching!
“I always say, ‘Parents, get your phones out, you’re not gonna want to miss this!’” explained Angie Moseley, founder and CEO of Double Dutch Divas. “And I always tell the kids, be great and don’t give up. You keep going. It’s the motivation and words for these kids. I tell them to say ‘I got it!’ It’s that motivational talk. If you just encourage these kids to be great, they’re gonna remember it for the rest of their lives.”
This partnership has been so successful, because as Kristina Atia, former SPIN Enrich Program Manager said, “we have such similar values, we have such deep care for the kids. And I think that’s what makes our partnership so great, is we’re aligned in our values, and we all have an equal role.”
Demographics
Financials
Sabbaticals
Over the last year, we’re proud that we’ve deepened the ways that we’ve supported our staff. Not only have we increased staff pay across the board, but we’ve also added some great new benefits, including allowing staff who have been here more than 7 years to take a fully paid sabbatical. We also added a supplemental paid family leave plan that paid staff who were on the state paid family and medical leave the difference between their salary and what their state benefits paid for 10 weeks.
Ms. Florence at Beacon Hill
“I’ve been at Launch for 18 years. I started my 12-week sabbatical at the end of June, and for me it was the right time because I needed to take time off because I had lost my mom in December. So the sabbatical was a time where I could just focus on that, grieve, and not have to come to work. I had to plan for my mom’s celebration of life which took a lot of my time. But I did have a lot of fun on my sabbatical even with dealing with that. I did a lot of walking around Alki with my family early in the morning, which I enjoyed. We did a big family reunion at Beacon Hill which was fun. Spending quality time with family and friends was really good. I did a lot of reading. I like to dance, so I did a lot of dancing. I redid my patio. I went to the Clearwater resort and sat by the water and watched the eagles.
For me the best thing was just being able to be at home, sleep, get up, and not have something to do. I’ve always had to take care of my mom and brother for the last 2 years, so the time off was really good for me. Just getting in tune with myself and taking care of myself. I think that’s really important.
I was wondering if I was going to be able to come back to work and the kids and step back into that teaching role, and for me taking that time off was rejuvenating. I really missed the kids and my job, and I felt refreshed when I came back. It was good for my mental health. I missed my Beacon Hill family, and was glad to come back and be welcomed by everyone.
I think the sabbatical helped me because I feel more energized. Taking time for yourself without having to worry about coming to work lets you get more in touch with yourself. I’m a nurturer and take care of everybody else, so having the sabbatical time at this point in my life was perfect because I’m doing more things for myself instead of taking care of others. I can’t even describe the feeling. At first I felt guilty. But then I felt really happy. I feel like I got my power back.
I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to take a sabbatical. I recommend it! It was like a weight lifted off me. I’m eligible to retire next year, but now I’m probably not. By the end of my sabbatical I was excited and ready to come back to work.”
Sharail
“I started my 12-week sabbatical in June of this year a little before the school year ended. I did come back to see the Madrona children throughout the summer if I happened to be in the area.
My 7th grade daughter drove the direction of our sabbatical journey. And I say our sabbatical journey because it was very much her sabbatical too. I didn’t put her in any summer camps or summer school, it was just me and her together. We decided to be tourists in our own backyard. She’s big into museums, so we visited SO many museums, museums I’d never even heard of before. We went to MoPOP which is one of my daughter’s favorites. We went to the Mermaid Museum in Aberdeen, which is a hidden gem. We took long drives to nowhere just to see waterfalls and little patches of forestland. It was great. We went to Jetty Island in Everett. You take a 2 minute ferry, and you see sea lions swimming in the water. There’s a fabulous island and sand and water, and we brought sandwiches and sat together and enjoyed the beautiful view.
I love, love, love crafting. I love to make dolls. So one of the things I embarked on this summer was starting my own business to make dolls. It’s kinda like my side hustle. So every week during my sabbatical I was producing something because it’s a passion of mine. I decided that I make all of these dolls, and instead of hoarding them I should share them with the world. I spent a lot of time figuring out what a business would look like for me, what my process was going to be, and working with a company to help me figure these things out. So that was a lot of fun!
I read a lot. I love mysteries and dystopian future-type stuff. Lately I’ve been on a young adult/teen kick. This summer I had audio books that I would listen to while I’d cook or clean, and then I had a physical book I was reading. I was reading literally a book a week.
The sabbatical wass great. I feel like as a person who has been with Launch 17 years, and have been working my whole entire adult life and very rarely taking a vacation that’s a week long – just a day or two here and there – it felt so magical to be able to take that time off to spend with myself and spend with my daughter. I had once a week dinners with my mom and daughter. It was so beautiful, and I’m very thankful and grateful to be able to have that time. The experience helped me to be able to come back feeling refreshed and ready for this school year.
Getting into that work-life balance can be hard. The sabbatical really helped to recharge me before I started my new position at Launch as the Miller Annex site manager. It helped me get back all of the energy I put into the school year, get back to me, and refocus on me and my family. For Launch to be able to offer that to its employees is wonderful. There are not a lot of companies that are doing that!”