By Madeleine Pointner 
Collaboration Project Administrative Assistant

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and we’ve been thinking about all the awesome school support happening here in Dane County through our local churches. 

Here are 10 different ways local churches have supported schools in our county. We hope these ideas capture your imagination for ways that you or your church could also get involved in supporting our schools and blessing our teachers. 

Check out these creative ideas: 

• Blackhawk Church hosts Love Madison, which is coming up quickly on May 22, and two of their service opportunities are garden clean up at Savanna Oaks Middle School, and writing encouraging notes to school staff.

• City on a Hill hosted a Christmas store in their church building to give families from Leopold Elementary the opportunity to buy new, discounted items as Christmas gifts for their families. 

• Crescendo Coffee, owned by church members in the Madison area, roasted a special Henderson Elementary School coffee blend, and a portion of every bag sold goes to the school. 

• Foundry 414 recruited UW grad students to be tutors at Wright Middle School. 

• Geneva Campus Church worked with school social workers to give money toward rent abatement for local school families with rent needs.

• Life Center organized drives for coats, hats, and gloves during the coldest parts of winter and distributed them to a number of local elementary churches. 

• Mt. Zion Baptist Church runs an Academic Learning Center after-school program in their building to support school age children. 

• Seeds of Peace, a collaboration of eight eastside and Monona churches, provides weekend take-home meals for students who eat free school lunches during the week. They offer this program at Schenk Elementary School, Allis Elementary School, and Nuestro Mundo Community School.

• Trinity Lutheran collected new winter gloves for Lowell Elementary School this past winter. 

• Westminster Presbyterian Church have been long-term partners with Thoreau Elementary and Cherokee Heights Middle School, supporting the Thoreau Summer reading program, doing warm clothing drives,  and setting up pen-pals. 

We hope these ideas inspire you. We celebrate what these churches are doing to support our local schools and teachers! Tell us what you or your church are doing to support our schools at info@collaborationproject.us. 

We invite you to partner with us in telling stories that highlight how God is working in and through the local church by supporting Collaboration Project today.