GiGi’s Playhouse Locations

As a 501 (c)3 children’s charity, The Toy Foundation’s (TTF) mission is to provide philanthropic support and the vital commodity of play to children and families under stress and in dire situations, across the country and globe. TTF’s donations represent the charitable work of TTF and the toy industry.

Since its inception in 2003, its Toy Bank has provided $225 million in toys to more than 26 million underserved children coping with serious illness, enduring temporary home placements in the foster care system, living with domestic violence, and/or dealing with natural disasters. In 2021, TTF provided $675,000 in cash grants to nearly 3 million children impacted by the pandemic.

TTF is also broadening its mission to provide grant funding to children’s hospitals to encourage healing through play and to foster a diverse and inclusive culture and pipeline of talent for the toy industry.

With the support of the toy industry, including toy manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and licensors, The Toy Bank has provided an enormous amount of toys to more than 26 million children around the globe, thanks to our generous donors.

How Do We Accomplish Our Mission?

· We provide millions of brand-new toys for children in underserved communities annually with the support of our industry partners.

· We distribute grant funding to children’s charities across the country.

· We establish partnerships with national organizations to focus on specific issues impacting children and families.

· We research and promote the benefits of play, educating the public and highlighting the industries charitable work.

TTF’s giving supports kids who continue to be impacted by COVID-19 and those who are coping with serious illness, enduring temporary home placements in the foster care system, living with domestic violence, and/or dealing with natural disasters. When children receive a new toy, they feel special. A toy reminds them that someone out there cares about them and provides a sense of hope and promise.

The Toy Foundation™ team

1375 Broadway, Suite 1001 New York, NY 10018

Main Phone: (212) 675-1141

Email: ttfinfo@toyfoundation.org

Academics West was founded in 2011 by Dr. Jeffrey Kassinove and Dr. Evan Flamenbaum, both of whom are mental health professionals and educators. Initially, they worked together to help students who struggled social-emotionally to fit within a typical educational setting. Over time, they realized that a typical general or special education setting is not always effective, even with extensive support. This led to the development of Academics West and the Clinically Informed Academics® model. These ideas were not initially written down but were the expression of their frustration with standard educational settings and their belief that there was a better way to help those who struggle. The vision statement of AW became the foundation of their collective work, which is now the ideal that all staff embraces when working with students at AW.

Their Journey

As school-based mental health professionals for many years before we founded Academics West, we witnessed so many students who just did not “fit” into the expectations of even the most specialized schools. Over the course of a continued discussion on how best to meet both the social-emotional and academic needs of students, we arrived at some fundamental realizations that serve as the cornerstone of the Academics West philosophy and unique high support model. First, we realized that so often students who are underperforming or acting out in school are sent to residential placements. Although there are times when this is necessary, we also felt that with the correct constellation of support, many of these students might not have required a higher level of care. Moreover, family preservation emerged as our core reason to create Academics West which allows students to receive comprehensive support in the context of a day program.

It also became clear to us that a critical ingredient was missing from the interventions that our students were typically receiving. Knowing that learning and therapy rely heavily on executive functioning for students to be able to store and utilize the skills they were being taught, we were astounded that this was not an integral component of every student’s individual support plan. Clinically Informed Academics®, and integration of clinical and educational skill development, emerged from the missing piece of the support puzzle. We have been amazed at the outcomes we have observed for over a decade due to this methodology. When students make gains in therapy as well as in their ability to be successful at school, a kind of transformation occurs. A student who was struggling emotionally and felt they could never be a successful student is replaced with a hopeful, motivated learner who knows how they learn and is able to handle life’s challenges. The proof is in the pudding: 100% of our graduating students since inception have been accepted into college, a goal many students and parents felt was not attainable.

Finally, we spent a long time determining what kind of philosophy we could embrace and impart to our staff and students to energize them to support our model of change. Ultimately, the concept of the Hero’s Journey resonated with us and has been infused into the structure and culture of Academics West. Students come to us feeling worn down by the many trials and tribulations they have experienced. With sufficient support supplied by kind and supportive mentors (our amazing teaching and clinical staff) students emerge from their challenges as true heroes. The realization that struggles can breed success and resilience is the lifeblood that flows through Academics West. We invite you to participate in our amazing journey.

Students Who Benefit Most From Academics West

The central purpose of creating a high-support program with a rigorous academic component is to develop an environment capable of meeting each student’s needs. Academics West sometimes serves as an aftercare setting for adolescents who need a step-down environment capable of continuing their educational and therapeutic work or a setting intended to meet their needs without leaving home. The common denominator of all our students is that they are bright, kind, and creative and have failed to thrive in a typical educational placement. Moreover, we are proud of the diversity of our student population and staff. This diversity is represented by students of different races, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and gender identities and orientations.

Our adolescents are best described as “internalizers” because their struggles are more inwardly experienced than outwardly expressed. Internalizers often refer to those who struggle with depression, anxiety, trauma, and other struggles that make it hard for them to attend school and benefit from positive interpersonal relationships with peers. These students often have been diagnosed with co-occurring learning weaknesses or ADHD. Our CIA® model is designed to consider each student’s social-emotional needs and remediate learning weaknesses by using each student’s learning profile to develop an intervention plan to address areas of executive dysfunction. Simply, it is our intention that all adolescents who successfully complete our program have rehearsed skills acquired through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and become strategic learners able to autonomously succeed in post-secondary education.

Like our adolescents, our younger students are highly intelligent and resourceful, but tend to externalize their behavior during times of stress. It is not uncommon for a student to start Academics West because their dysregulation was not tolerated at their previous program. As a group of behaviorists, we craft a behavior plan for each student to support their acquisition of adaptive skills to help them regulate and engage in learning and develop positive relationships with peers. Often, we have the rewarding pleasure of witnessing a once dysregulated student who has felt marginalized and misunderstood evolve into a capable student ultimately able to re-integrate into a less supportive setting. Like some of our adolescents, our younger students also need to acquire effective compensatory learning skills instructed by our special educators who are well-versed in our CIA® approach to remediation.

Academics West

37 W 65th St.
New York, NY 10023
Ph: 212-580-0800
Website: academicswest.com
Dr. Jeffrey Kassinove
Dr. Evan Flamenbaum

White Plains Elementary is a rural school and part of the Calhoun County Board of Education in east central Alabama. White Plains is a Pre- Kindergarten through Fourth Grade school. White Plains Elementary serves as a feeder school to White Plains Middle School for grades 5 to 8 and White Plains High School for grades 9 to 12. There are a limited number of businesses in the community. The White Plains Community is landlocked between other communities which limits their economic growth. The local businesses within the immediate area and even some in the Anniston/Oxford city limits support to the school. White Plains Elementary is mainly supported by the caring parents through school fundraisers and the parent teacher organization.

The Bluebee Pal Project identifies organizations in need of educational tools for early childhood children who require extra support from educators, speech and occupational therapists. Over the past five years, our organization have provided hundreds of educators and therapists with Bluebee Pal assistive technology tools to enhance education and communication. We are excited about our donation to the White Plains Elementary School and anticipate provider feedback will state positive results of their students.

“Our early childhood educators and speech therapists are confident Bluebee Pal Plush Educational Tools will engage students in promoting reading and communication. Many of my students have autism or language delays in skills that we take for granted. Our students are working on producing speech sounds to improve speech clarity, conversational turn taking, new vocabulary/concepts, providing appropriate answers and learning to ask their own questions.” Katrina Ginn-Speech-language pathologist

White Plains Elementary is proud to be a recipient of the Bluebee Pal Project and looks forward to the impact the Bluebee Pals will have on their students.

White Plains Elementary School

5600 Alabama Highway 9

Anniston, AL 36207

The founder of Bluebee Pals, Laura Jiencke, donated through the Bluebee Pal Project, a Bluebee Family Pack of Interactive Educational Plush Learning tools and three iPads to the Southampton Day Care Center (SDCC) in Southampton, NY.

As many of you know the Bluebee Pals connect to any Apple or IOS Device and pair with most apps and are a multifaceted learning tool. It now has extensive curriculum available on Google Workbench designed by the experts on the Bluebee Team. The lessons include Essential Life Skills, which are defined as behaviors that enable individuals to adapt and deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. As well as STEM/ELA, ESL, as well as ACC support for children with special needs and more.

This was the daycare’s first introduction to any kind of educational technology in their classrooms. A sad state of affairs in 2019 and in such an affluent area of the world! Often people are not able to look beyond their own backyard to see what is going on in their community and this oversight seems to be more prevalent in resort areas. Fortunately for us, we had the newly elected mayor of Southampton participating in this event and hope this will raise awareness and encourage others to get involved with SDCC, esp. philanthropists with an interest in education.

The donation came about after I made a recent visit to SDCC and introduced the BluebeePals to the preschool-aged children. Obviously, the kids were smitten with the adorable Bluebee Pals and photos were shared with Laura.

Once she saw the reaction these kids had and I explained the lack of funding this nonprofit has, she was moved as always and offered a generous gift of all six plushies. Several days later I had the realization that this facility did not have any tablets to support the Bluebee Pals, Laura stepped up and purchased three iPads for them! (Read about the Bluebee Pal Project here) It was quite an exciting morning on the day of the donation, a quick lesson was planned of reviewing the names of the six different Bluebee Pals characters before announcing that the whole Bluebee Pal family and new iPads would be staying with them.

The energy was high and the kids were over the top once learning that the Bluebee Pal family and the tablets would be staying with them! This engaging and fun way to learn will be bringing joy for some time to come for SDCC as they also have a nursery program for younger children.

The educators at the daycare center will be assisted with ongoing professional development designed by the Bluebee Pal team to help them with this new approach to learning. The Southampton Day Care Center Director was most appreciative of the generous contribution, and the children were beyond thrilled! The BEST part, they will be all the more ready to begin school. (More on getting ready for school here) More on BluebeePals & Teachers With Apps Here

PedsAcademy at Nemours Children’s Hospital is the world’s first pediatric school program designed to provide children in hospitals with extraordinary, research-backed educational opportunities specific to their respective disease or condition.

Building PedsAcademy has been a dream of mine since I first walked into a children’s hospital as a volunteer teacher in 2012. At that time, I became aware of an entire population of children who were, by all accounts, invisible in the broader field of education. While every child’s education is important, our aim through PedsAcademy is to reduce educational inequality by improving the quality of education available to children for whom both health and education are already severely diminished and for whom the betterment of each is an absolute requirement of justice—children with chronic and complex medical issues. Our curriculum and teaching methods in PedsAcademy are primarily based in robotics and immersive virtual reality interventions, including the development of avatars for the children and other virtual humans to address their disease or condition specific needs such as neurocognitive deficit, physiological positioning, and socio-emotional health. Our aim is to go far beyond the minimum, to provide an extraordinary education experience at PedsAcademy so that children re-enter their school with a leg up as critical problem solvers, flexible thinkers, and irrepressible learners.

As one of the largest universities in the nation, we are able to harness the power of scale to bring 54 UCF affiliated faculty and students on site to run PedsAcademy. PedsAcademy includes a semester long cohort internship for pre-service elementary teachers in order to prepare them to teach specifically to this population of students. This high impact experience intentionally combines several well-accepted high-impact practices that result in deeper learning and greater engagement, in addition to gaining real-world experience and developing professional competencies.

Beyond our pre-service teachers, PedsAcademy provides an opportunity for UCF students from all colleges to explore the possibilities of collaboration with non-traditional school settings, vulnerable populations, and healthcare providers to discover how they can align themselves and their career aspirations with meaningful work now and in the future. Students from across UCF colleges gain an immersive view of educating high-needs populations through clinical teaching experience, academic courses, individual and collaborative research projects, and educational seminars provided by UCF and Nemours’ faculty.

Thank you for your role in helping making PedsAcademy a success.

• Megan Nickels, Ph.D.
• Faculty Director, UCF’s PedsAcademy at Nemours Children’s Hospital
• Assistant Professor, STEM Education
• College of Community Innovation and Education
• School of Teacher Education
• Assistant Professor, STEM Education
• College of Medicine
• Clinical Sciences
• University of Central Florida

PedsAcademy at Nemours Children’s Hospital
13535 Nemours Pkwy
Orlando, FL 32827

TechACCESS of Rhode Island was founded in 1991 to provide assistive technology (AT) services to people with disabilities. In 2016, we merged with HMEA to expand our mission into Massachusetts.TechACCESS believes that an informed consumer working collaboratively with knowledgeable professionals can best identify and select effective technology devices and services to improve his or her independent functioning. To achieve this, our programs are offered to assistive technology users, families, educational and therapeutic professionals, and others interested in learning more about assistive technology.

Their services include evaluations, consultations, trainings, tech support, and professional development. Our services are available to individuals with disabilities of all ages.A big part of the identity of TechACCESS has been our annual assistive technology conference, which today is called the Assistive Technology Conference of New England. The first RI state-wide assistive technology conference, held in 1988 at the Warwick Campus of the Community College of RI, was entitled the “TechACCESS Conference”, as this was a name that embodied the two primary focuses for the conference – technology and accessibility. Fueled by the volunteer contributions of so many professionals, students, schools, agencies, companies, and parents of persons with disabilities, the first conference had a budget of less than $100. Today, it is a 2-day event attended by hundreds from all over the United States and beyond who come to see national level presenters share their expertise on current assistive technologies.

As a community resource, TechACCESS offers information on all types of assistive technology. We are the central information, resource, and demonstration site for the Assistive Technology Access Partnership (ATAP), the Rhode Island Tech Act grant. The Rhode Island Assistive Technology Access Partnership (ATAP) is designed as a statewide partnership of organizations, each with a targeted assistive technology focus, working together to improve access to and acquisition of assistive technology for individuals with disabilities.

ATAP’s main initiatives include:

• Device Demonstration
• Device Loan
• Device Re-Use
• Training, Public Awareness, Collaboration, Information & Referral

We just received our Bluebee Pals! They are absolutely FANTASTIC! We will be using them this afternoon for a speech therapy session. I can’t thank you enough!

Kelly Charlebois, ATP
Executive Director
TechACCESS of RI
161 Comstock Parkway