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Volunteers of America – Dakotas helps so many people across our region, and Levo is proud to help them help others! Devonte Garcia shares more about their mission with Levo’s Jen McKeown.Transcript:
(0:01) Levo is pleased to be able to make this donation to Volunteers of America Dakotas. (0:07) Yes, thank you Jen. So I'm Devante Garcia, I'm the Managing Director of Development at (0:11) Volunteers of America Dakotas and we are so grateful for Levo and their contribution to (0:16) our program.
So every year we're blessed to touch about 10,000 lives directly here in the Sioux (0:20) Falls community. We have four focused areas, so we help individuals with intellectual and (0:26) developmental disabilities, children, youth, and families specifically through out of school time (0:31) programs. So there's about six elementary schools in the area that we provide free daycare sixth (0:35) through fifth grade.
We have Camp Postcard, which is a wonderful summer camp where we have middle (0:40) school sixth graders come to Lake Mesodack with officers in the area to be able just to help bond (0:47) and get to understand that police officers are human beings and that they really are here to (0:50) protect and serve. We also have our veterans program, so we really help veterans who have (0:56) served their country but feel like the country hasn't given back and served them and so they're (1:00) falling on hard times and so we help them find permanent housing and employment and then we also (1:06) have, oh forgive me, I'm trying to think of what my last one is. It's okay.
We have intellectual (1:10) developmental disabilities, we have children, youth, and families, we have our veterans, oh and our Access (1:14) 180 program, which is with for homeless teenagers, so 16 through 21. We have the Access 180 program (1:19) and so you guys are, your funds help that. You know we operate at about a 20 million dollar budget (1:25) and usually it's about 50 or 500 thousand dollar, you know, plus or minus deficit that we run every (1:30) year and so every dollar counts as a non-profit and so knowing that we can have this now to be (1:36) able to continue to move forward, look to next year and be able to help our mission and grow, (1:40) the people that we're called to be able to help live healthy and fulfilling lives, so we are so (1:43) grateful and thankful for this because, you know, outside of the state funding that we get, it is (1:49) because of, you know, the community that we have here to be able to help us be able to continue to (1:53) make sure that we get to do the Lord's work and so we're so grateful Jen and Levo as a whole for (1:57) this opportunity, so thank you.
And thank you for everything you do for our community. Yes, it's our pleasure.
