The Cheyenne River Youth Project® has announced that it will offer a discount on all Family Services annual memberships starting on Wednesday, October 1. The discount, which CRYP will offer until October 31, will apply to new applications and renewals; the memberships are valid from October 1, 2014 until September 30, 2015.
Normally, an annual membership is priced at $30 per year. During the discount period, a Cheyenne River family can join the Family Services program for $25, and that one-time payment will cover all members of that family for the entire year. Memberships are available to anyone who lives on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, not just those who live in the city of Eagle Butte.
“We’re hoping that all of our current families renew their Family Services memberships, and that more new families sign up for the program,” said Julie Garreau, CRYP’s executive director. “It’s the perfect time, because our annual Christmas Toy Drive is right around the corner. Anyone enrolling or renewing for 2015 is eligible to participate.”
Families who are enrolled in Family Services before November 1 will be able to fill out “Dear Santa” letters for their children and take part in this year’s toy drive. Each year, the 25-year-old, not-for-profit youth organization serves approximately 1,200 children in nearly 20 communities across the remote 2.8-million-acre reservation, and Garreau said she’d like to reach even more children this year.
“We’d love to hit the 1,500 mark,” she said. “With the Christmas Toy Drive, we have the ability to reach children in all areas of the reservation through gift pickups at our Eagle Butte campus and through deliveries. Thanks to our friends and supporters around the world, we have the ability to continue expanding the program, and we want to try to reach every child who might need us this Christmas.”
While the Christmas Toy Drive is by far the largest distribution handled by the 25-year-old, not-for-profit youth project, it’s not the only one. Family Services also includes annual school supplies, winter clothing and shoe drives, and it supplies much-needed household supplies and baby items on a regular basis.
“We also have a heat-match program to help families heat their homes during our bitter South Dakota winters, which usually kicks off after the holidays,” Garreau said. “So fall really is the best time to get involved with Family Services. Last winter, thanks to $20,000 in grant funding from Running Strong for American Indian Youth, we were able to provide matching funds to 1,318 individuals in 216 families — and 795 of those individuals were children.”
Family Services was founded in 2002 to manage CRYP’s influx of in-kind donations throughout the year. Surveys have shown that most member households use Family Services once per quarter, although many members do come in once per month, and most participate in the organized distributions such as the Christmas Toy Drive and the School Supplies Drive.
“We’re now welcoming our second generation of children to CRYP, and we learned long ago that one of the best ways to support them was to help ease the burdens of daily life for their families,” Garreau explained. “Our reservation comprises two of the nation’s poorest counties, and there’s no question that our children are exposed to adult stresses early on. They have to grow up fast.
“So if we can make things a little easier for the care-givers, we can improve the quality of life for our youth,” she continued. “We can make sure that our kids get to be kids, at least for a little while longer.”
All proceeds from membership fees and fundraisers such as community rummage sales support the Family Services program infrastructure. This includes staff, administrative hardware and donation/inventory management tools.
“We want to make sure that community members understand how their funds are used,” Garreau said. “We started Family Services more than a decade ago because we needed a way to manage the huge amounts of donations that we would receive throughout the year. We also knew we needed to manage those donations in a responsible, transparent manner — and to do that, we need dedicated staff and professional management tools. That’s how we ensure that Family Services will remain a reliable community resource in the years to come.”
The Cheyenne River Youth Project, founded in 1988, is a grassroots, not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing the youth of the Cheyenne River reservation with access to a vibrant and secure future through a wide variety of culturally sensitive and enduring programs, projects and facilities that ensure strong, self-sufficient families and communities.