What an exciting month September has been!

At New Hope we love our DSPs and were thrilled to honor them during DSP week, September 8^th – 14^th. This year we had a Rainbow of Possibilities as our theme.  Each day of the week we dressed up in fun and different ways, all to celebrate our DSPs.  Also, during DSP week New Hope does its annual training, where every DSP comes into New Hope to be personally trained by our managers on State requirements.  You should have seen New Hope!  It was decorated for DSPs in our fun rainbow theme.  Each DSP also received a rainbow umbrella with our New Hope logo on it!  One of the most poignant parts of this year’s DSP week, was a poem written by Femi Owolabi about his DSP experience.  This was our first year for a poetry contest and did it deliver!  You can read the reflection here. Wasn’t that amazing!

New Hope is lucky to be blessed with many talented DSPs—I thank them all from the bottom of my heart!

Then two weeks ago, New Hope was featured on WISH-TV as part of the LISC Love Thy Neighborhood awards. And we won the Livability category!   We were thrilled with this honor!  Then, thanks to all of you voting for us last week, we learned that we won the People’s Choice Award!  If you haven’t seen our video, it is awesome!  You can view it here.  You can also view the other videos of the other 11 community not for profits that are doing great work! Last Thursday, I was at WISH-TV when they announced that we had won the People’s Choice award and the $5,000 that goes with it (in addition to the $2,500 award for winning the Livability category). So exciting!  I ended my time at WISH-TV Life. Style. Live! with Felicia Michelle talking to her about the award and the Cheese and Thank You food truck.

We are so excited to be able to invest the $7,500 total award back into the food truck!  The food truck is such a great program, providing job training skills, but it also is consistent with the New Hope work of growing a community for people of all abilities.  There are still two days left in October (7^th, 21^st) to have the food truck come to your office or you can book for next May at cheeseandthankyou.org. I hope October will bring even more excitement to New Hope! Happy Fall!

Allison