good evening i will go through that welcome to another edition to focus on and i will be talking about the prince or princeton children's fund which is a new fund that we just started and some i guess on the show will be describing it and talking about its mission and who they serve and how it's going to grow in the next couple of years and grow to be something that will be tremendous for everybody in the community and first i have a strata who is a senior at princeton high and will be informing us about what p c f is doing and for those of you who don't know about p c s let me just read to you its mission from this great literature that just got published  in the princeton public school community and so on that note maybe felicia maybe you could come a little bit about p c s certainly thinks of printing children's fund is really a response to what's happening nationally in terms of it's not being enough to get kids into college and into careers where they can realize some measure of achievement so in princeton what's happened is there has been i would say over past three decades a reduction in our middle class and there is a lack of affordable housing in the community so it's kind of forced division  you have many students now who are severely financially in need and we have what most people think of when they think of princeton as the kind of wealthy princeton families princeton children's fund wants to kind of put us all back together again and remove that financial divide that's changing the opportunities as kids go through school and what we found is that it starts before they even get to kindergarten if mom and dad didn't have time to read bedtime stories continues and they get to school and they don't know their alphabet so what princeton children's fund is trying to do is to really fill in some of those gaps and we're doing it with as you mentioned the extra curricular and enrichment activities so after school clubs all the way up to the high school where it might be less eighty tutoring and summer literacy programs so it's really a very actuality well we came to princeton ten years ago and us everybody is going to notice i have an accent so we come we come from spain we've been in different places and the united states so when you get into princeton you realize that you're not like everybody else so what what when we came here i had i have three kids and then they were limited training middle school and high school so i started realizing that there were there was a community who needed translations and helped a lot of the hospital and help with medical issues and also that so i started realizing that the community got bigger and bigger and bigger because princeton has a lot of we have a restaurant not a supermarket and all that and these parents work in these places but they need a little bit of help and push to do their you know to help their kids so that's how i started helping and a year ago we realize fifty years of us got together and we started brainstorming how this could be you know how could we make like an organization who can help all these kids efforts not yesterday but many years ago as a volunteer translator and by twenty fifteen she was officially working in community outreach and had identified the need for the prince and children's fund and as we mentioned not only just serving as president working directly with families in town who need p c s systems that will you know there's a lot of work with a lot of families and serves as a valuable resource you know throughout the town throughout a lot of areas which is called upon at all times of the day and night and for that i know a lot of an elementary school in the district and she holds a bachelor's degree in psychology with concentrations in clinical and bio psychology and for the first twenty years for a career for which work the medical medications project management during which time she volunteered that you can also donate to our web site ok with this princeton children's fund dot org ok and we are i one hundred percent volunteer organization so every dollar of your donation is going to and it's something where you can help directly in your community that's a good thing so even though you're technically a new charity you know as we've talked before you've been working informally with many students in schools for almost a decade  was wondering if either one of you have any stories that you can share about about this no i actually do remember cover on a year ago when liliana started doing all this safety so she reached out to me she connected me to like this phenomenal tutor she got me all this great books to help me out a lot because you know i'm really about taking tests so when she did all this help for me she gave i guess like among hispanic people where we're like we got our high school and we got to go to work and i said and i daresay always that stereotype around right but like when i go into ninth grade i will say we have projects going to be my life just going to go pocono stuff he had me helping me a lot as well so he had already helped me a lot in the community were helping me out too so they were helping me i saw then i was like i want to get back to the community because that's the way to say thank you for something that they gave me so this when i started doing all this work for the community to be able to like give out to other students or other people that are in need so now you know back in after i didn't think of college now i'm  and happy and want to be able to give back to the community well that's good so full grown up too and that's i think if you're one of the first ones to go to college in your family i know a lot of times we have this generation one program of high school and  of the goals of generation one is to have you know first generation students go to college as opposed to thinking that boy just graduate high school maybe and then get a job family you know so there are that you have an opportunity to grow because you know every individual has a talent and a gift and it's our job to make sure we're exposing everyone to the sounds we give back and so the fact that you're giving back is a great thing and i'm sure when you come back after going to rutgers and come back to the community and walk around they're going to say hey you know i want to be like luis you don't want to i want to go to college too and i think that's the most powerful story that you can get that's the word of mouth that has to be successful story yeah so i know there's been some bumps on the road too so it hasn't always been smooth it it's always been you know so i was that's a challenge because you know many students in our school maybe don't have that kind of situation but now that i know that i'm mad about it or sad about it it's something that i get to learn from having those two different jobs going to school time had to be responsible how to you know manage my schedule wisely and that we have been able to you know prior to this or four years of high school going to my two different jobs going to school to my work and trying to be someone better than the was before so i think there's always the small bump but you can always learn from them and be better than they were before so you know that's my thing that's how it's supposed to be and thing i learn a lot from and that's good and i know you know you see luis grow over the years my and maybe you can talk a little bit about that and maybe if there's other stories of other students to hear well this is luis is now in high school but if you remember it's when you get into when you're in the lemon tree student so the schedule more or less is what you need now so it's back to school so you need to get ready in the month of september so you need your backpack and all that then you have halloween show you your costume and then you have a sense giving and then you need to prepare for thanksgiving and then you have christmas and what's going to happen in christmas and then it gets very cold and then you need food and then you need you know itself very different needs that you have and then we go to you know all this then we go to easter and what are we doing for you know we start getting ready for summer camps and all that and then so all of this is a process and what we would like is all these students who started very young to get more and more comfortable even though you because of any needs you have know to be like your other peer so that's the push that b c f wants to give to be you know to be part of to be part of a prince and public school kid as i told you before i have three kids and i'm very grateful to bring some of the schools because the three of them have done very very well not only not the three of them are very good students but one was a very good musician so it's a it's i think it's a way like really saying it's a way of giving so i think my three kids did very well and i would like that same opportunity to other kids and this is what we're pushing for in this is what we believe so it's like we we can do it we can do it yeah and i think one of the things that's very difficult to realize is that in princeton public schools twelve percent i'm sure you know this but i think many of your viewers may not twelve percent of the students are applied for free and reduced lunch which means that food insecurity is something that they live with on a daily basis and it's almost five hundred children in our schools are concerned about food so if food is an issue soccer or you know any other sport that's off the table ballet or dance or music clubs and anything any the after school activities are on the table so while princeton does provide a fantastic education whether our children want to take advantage of that or not there's a lot of other things that go into the school experience and that make i think individual students feel like they're part of that experience and not kind of just watching it from the outside and that's the other thing that we want to do we want everybody in town to have the same experience in have the opportunities to have that same experience so maybe you're not a great student and maybe the fantastic education in princeton isn't your priority but maybe you're a talented ballet dancer or maybe you're a phenomenal soccer player we want to support those efforts too because that's a little outside of what the school does and that's where we can help so if it's cleats you need if it's the actual after school club during the summer with some of our little ones sum mer programming is a huge issues so we have been frantically working for the past month getting a summer program in place so that children have the you know literacy programs through the schools in the morning and then we get them to you know some type of camp or activity that will allow their parents to work the full day and also give the kids some of that experience of just living here in princeton it's very important so good student or not not everyone is luis and we want to acknowledge all those kids and include them to go well that's good i think it's sporting to because i think there's a lot of the a lot of needs that people don't know about right but also we need to provide the resources to those students who need the most assistance because we're sure the members up into the you know down the road so that takes a lot of lifting and you know you've done a lot of work with the you know the infrastructure the ministry of infrastructure of p c s and you know we mentioned earlier maybe we can talk about it when we're time because you know i always like to you know and public about helping but a lot of people may be sitting at home right now to watch the show and to be thinking well how can i help what can i do do you accept volunteers what could i do there's a lot so i mean anything from in you know in september right before it starts getting cold  need coats and boots to please pull out your checkbook and write a check if you want to volunteer we have volunteer forms on our website which again is princeton children's fund dot org and it gives everybody an opportunity to fill in what skills they have they think might be helpful and whether that organizing a community you know close collections to talking to the camps that your children attend and see if they could help with some you know free or reduced price spots for the children that we need to cover their summer programming we can take all kinds of help but let me talk about what people want to know well my money went somewhere what would it be dollars you can support an elementary school students and you'll program expenses for four fifty you can support a middle school students and a program expenses and for six if the you can be the difference and support a high school students and you'll program expenses so if volunteering is not in your timeframe but you want to make a difference in a student's life or in the future then please know that the money goes directly to what is needed is no is an unmitigated overhead and that p c f will be taking you right to the students who who need this and your help is what will make it possible and the work that you doing right now have you had an opportunity to summer is the sport about one hundred fifteen twenty elementary school students and hopefully you know the money will be raised there but when you see p c s growing over the next couple of years and are strong you know  i make this one now that yes initially so we're kind of prioritizing and then based away so we want to cover all the elementary schools first and then move on to the middle school and then the high school  so initially our goal is to cover all the elementary school students and you know from coats and boots in the winter and halloween costumes all the way through summer programming then are also hoping that some of the p p o s at the schools will i know everyone has been trying to maintain an individual kind of scholarship fund and we don't want to step in anyone yet but if if they are unable with maybe the volunteers they have to maintain that they can reach out to us and we'll be happy to partner with them and work together so that every school has some coverage down the road what we'd like to do is actually you know by the time we get to the high school similarly to what luis is to ing where he's volunteering and he's you know running peer leadership groups and he's working here at health and human services  we want to give our recipients the opportunity to come back and help so maybe it's tutoring some of the little kids who need assistance but really to rebuild that community and that sense of everybody's in this together and when no one can succeed alone we only succeed when we all succeed so our goal is to really get back to that place where the community is intact involved and helping one community and you know be tells us to be what we want to be yeah and they're stepping up i mean we're getting you know from one of our salon passes he's he's giving us you know ten  see how much an impact someone helping you out can have on a student so now i want to have that impact on other students and then all the people as well you know i want to be able to let them know that that kind of help help me succeed and if we give the help to other students there will be able to succeed as well that's there that is the case that is hopefully that will continue to be the case and as i think you said a very good a lot of times a lot of non school get into our blinders mode right and we always think that somebody else going to take everett or you know we get too busy or whatever and it turns out that we need each other ok we need to take care of things and not expect somebody else to do it because when you expect that nobody else is doing it then nothing gets done and so what we're doing really is building the future and trying to build a generation that will take care of discus leading generation you know growing up and make things  across before we before we go on the air tonight well again it's of course we need money because since you know without money we can't do anything but it's i really want to stress how the idea of this is the princeton children's fun so we want a better princeton we want a united princeton that it's princeton has the beauty of it's a very generous community it's very giving and it's  think it's it's great that we're part of you know that they are part of us were part of them and so that's i want to stress that out and then the children part is like please you have to think that not everybody is the same or  granted that other kids don't have and that's you know it's a little bit of makes you think that not everybody says like yes you are so right we have to think beautiful yellow pay pal donate button on there that you can go right and we really hope that you will also fill out the volunteer form and let us know what special skills you have and you know if you're a liquidity to to a very good organization so i want to thank luis for coming on my show tonight and it's been a great discussion and i want congratulate all three of you for starting the organization you next week have a good night