Opus Foundation® Partners with Impactful Kansas City Nonprofit Operation Breakthrough
Operation Breakthrough, winner of the inaugural Gerry Rauenhorst Building Community Award, has been a long-time partner of the Opus Foundation and The Opus Group. The Foundation has helped the nonprofit boost outcomes for the children Operation Breakthrough supports.
In partnership with the Opus Foundation® in 2015, we launched the Gerry Rauenhorst Building Community award to honor our founder’s legacy of giving and celebrate the rich history and tradition of our organization. Each year, the award will provide one nonprofit organization with $1000 for each year of that tradition.
Fueled by unwavering optimism, Gerry Rauenhorst demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit, creativity and a commitment to finding “a better way” to build a business, community and a value-centered life. With an enduring belief that business has a responsibility to strengthen society, Gerry ensured giving back was a cornerstone of our organization.
The Gerry Rauenhorst Building Community Award brings together impactful nonprofit organizations serving our eight markets, Opus associates and the greater public to help build community. Associates nominate organizations in their market and select a finalist to represent that market. Then, the public is invited to vote for the nonprofit they think best matches Gerry’s spirit.
In its inaugural year, the $62,000 Building Community Award was given to Operation Breakthrough. This inaugural award far exceeded our expectations. More than 50 organizations were nominated and the award garnered more than 18,000 votes and 6,000 social media mentions.
Since 1971, Operation Breakthrough has served youth and their families in Kansas City. With a mission to prepare kids for success in school and empower their parents to become self-sufficient and engaged caregivers, the organization has nationally-accredited early learning, after-school and summer programs that focus on academic achievement and healthy character development.
Knowing that children won’t reach their potential without a strong start, Operation Breakthrough provides health and emergency services, housing and employment assistance, parenting classes and other support. In short, Operation Breakthrough is a one-stop shop where innovative programming serves more than 400 children daily and helps families create new possibilities for their children to thrive. Operation Breakthrough provides services to a high-risk population with a large percentage having experienced trauma.
While the first program served 50 infants, toddlers and preschoolers, “thousands of Kansas City children have grown up at Operation Breakthrough,” making Operation Breakthrough many things to many people. To Opus, those things include the inaugural Gerry Rauenhorst Building Community Award winner and a long-time partner of the Opus Foundation in the Kansas City market.
This inaugural award was used to help create something Mary Esselman, president and CEO of Operation Breakthrough, had been dreaming of. With their budget allocated to providing excellent services for kids and families, the organization wanted to find a funding source to help make this dream a reality. With the award as seed money, the organization was able to successfully secure other funders. The result: dreams came true when the MakerSpace, an all-encompassing space that allows kids to tinker and learn, was opened up.
“Makerspaces provide creative time and, well, space for people of all ages to build prototypes, explore questions, fail and retry, bounce ideas off one another and build something together,” Mary Beth Hertz, a high school art and technology teacher in Philadelphia, wrote on edutopia, a website run by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. In another blog post on edutopia, Chris O’Brien, a project-based educator, wrote “the Maker Movement continues to grow” and identified the following four ways this movement can help students succeed and improve education:
1. Failure is vital to growth. Makerspaces create a healthy place for failure, allowing children to better learn from that failure.
2. By aligning the tinkering activities with learning standards, educators can bridge the gap for students to learn by doing.
3. Generally, project-based learning and activities are strong motivators for students.
4. Successful tinkering is a good indicator to a child that he can do something, and it also provides evidence of successful teaching.
Turning an under-utilized space into a wonderland of exploration, the Operation Breakthrough MakerSpace is strategically located next to the Parent Resource Center with many windows allowing people to observe tinkering and learning in action. The self-directed, open-ended activities address the forgotten but still important arts and 21st century skills that will set these children up for life-long success. “It’s not just about leveling the playing field,” Esselman said. “It’s about providing experiences that develop a love for learning in children and also make sure they’re ready for what’s ahead.”
The space serves the whole community — teachers, parents and kids. And that’s what makes it so exciting! Each week in the MakerSpace, over 300 children have the opportunity to tinker in six zones:
1. construction and toy hacking,
2. studio arts,
3. media and coding,
4. robotics,
5. cooking and
6. textiles.
In this space, children as young as three are learning to program computers thanks to early activities that teach sequencing, a coding skill that is also the basis of literacy and math and, really, life-long success. Children can build, explore, be creative and practice problem solving in the MakerSpace. “I had the fun of watching an ‘aha moment’ for one of our four year olds,” said Jennifer Heinemann, associate director of development at Operation Breakthrough. “A little girl had made a parachute. It didn’t work, so she looked at a friends’ that did fly and figured out what was wrong and quickly fixed her parachute.”
The MakerSpace has been a qualitative success. The organization is seeing increased engagement, focus and concentration. School-age children are even partnering with younger kids, a partnership that’s mutually beneficial. Also, kids get in line quickly when it’s time to head to the MakerSpace! Over time, Operation Breakthrough will be able to use the children’s Desired Results Developmental Profiles (DRDP) to quantitatively measure the MakerSpace’s impact.
And, the MakerSpace has been embraced by the community, too. All of the materials on the bookshelf in the space are donated, and people are constantly fulfilling the recyclable materials wish list. Volunteers are also being activated in a more focused manner thanks to the MakerSpace. They now feel they’re making more of a difference in how the children learn and develop.
“Our MakerSpace has re-invigorated some of our connections to the community,” Esselman said. “We have a lot of new volunteers who are coming specifically to help out in the MakerSpace. Long-time supporters are coming back to visit us again because they want to see the new space. And people all over the city are collecting craft supplies, paper towel tubes — you name it — for the children to use in the MakerSpace. People have really embraced the concept and are excited to see our children in action there.”
In November 2014, the Opus Foundation awarded Operation Breakthrough a $50,000 Impact Fund grant and followed that in December 2015 with another $50,000 Impact Fund grant, supporting the nonprofit’s Behavior Intervention Services. In collaboration with Children’s Mercy Hospital, the program aims to enhance children’s success in school through coordinated, evidence-based interventions and instructional practices. These behavior strategies provide two-generational support and promote kindergarten readiness.
Two key short-term goals have been established for the services: 1) promote students’ self-awareness, self-management and responsible decision-making skills and 2) improve students’ attitudes and beliefs about self, others and school.
Results since the program was piloted in 2014 have been impressive. More time in the classroom is spent in direct instruction or curriculum delivery versus time spent on behavioral issues. According to their assessments, over 80% of children have mastered most of the kindergarten-readiness indicators, up significantly from 2014.
Since 2010, the Opus Foundation has awarded Operation Breakthrough seven grants, totaling $274,044.
