Meet Cynthia Gattorna of A Stepping Stone Foundation

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cynthia Gattorna.

Cynthia, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Seeing so many needy children in the Phoenix area enter kindergarten woefully under-prepared to be successful in school, a group of grass-roots activists led by Rev. Bill Smith of Shadow Rock Church, Marilyn Rampley and Eileen Hoard of Shadow Rock Preschool, created a new public foundation in 1989 called A Stepping Stone. In 1990, with not even enough money to finish the first program year, the group served 20 families in the Isaac School District. They finished that year with the help of private donors, local foundations and local companies.

That fledgling organization has gone on to serve more than 1700 families with quality preschool, adult education, home visiting and parenting classes for nearly three decades.

How do I plug into all that? I came aboard as the first paid Executive Director in 2000.

I have always had a passion for education. For me, learning and teaching are inextricably linked. Early in my teaching career, I found I learned best when I had to teach a new subject and I taught best when I was open to learning what my students could teach me. Over that 14-year teaching career with Phoenix Elementary (1984-1998), I taught Spanish speaking immigrant children in a variety of elementary bilingual classrooms. It was there that I learned how far behind most of them were when they arrived in this country. As I taught them, I also learned how ill-prepared their families were to help them study, navigate the education system and interact with me and other teachers. When I had the opportunity to work with A Stepping Stone Foundation in 2000, I realized my education and experience had very much prepared me to develop, support and expand the program activities.

In 2004, the founders and I reconnected with three of those first preschoolers from 1990–the only ones they could find– and awarded them the first of more than 100 college scholarships.

So, I had been working for A Stepping Stone for four years when those first scholarships were awarded and had the privileged of helping the board set up that scholarship fund named after a migrant worker, Billie Gannaway, who had decided to stop following the field work as a teenager many years before A Stepping Stone began. She settled in Phoenix with the help of a stranger who let her sleep on her porch as her family moved on to California. Many years later, Billie completed her own high school and then college diploma. This is the determined and successful woman who seeded the scholarship fund with its first gift of $35,000.

When we handed those scholarships out at the first Bill and Billie’s Kids go to College dinner, it was a very proud and touching moment.

The pictures below tell a limited story of all the amazing impact we have on families’ lives over the course of a school year. The picture of me kneeling with the family from Bhurma is one of my favorites because this family came with nothing and only spoke a rare dialect; they came so far in one year and they were so proud of their child and each other!

In the personal photo below, I am standing front center (I’m the only one with a badge on) with the most recent board and one of our families that had multiple children go through our program. This photo was taken in front of our donated administrative office at our last annual board meeting after we had feasted on a home-made tamale dinner donated by the family.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It’s definitely been a bumpy road, but an interesting one!

Often as the local economy goes, so goes the fate of local nonprofits. When the severe economic downturn happened in 2008-2010, it seemed at first A Stepping Stone might be insulated and protected from the state’s economic woes. Donations and grants continued to come our way albeit with much effort. It seemed (and still does) that most people understood the importance of upstream thinking and get how important it is for young children to enter school ready to learn–and the important role that their parents play in that readiness.

In 2009, we had three sites in action with our public school partners and were serving more than 100 families a year. But by 2010, our funding streams had diminished drastically as the housing market had not recovered and local private foundations and trusts felt the pinch of lower returns, dismal revenue forecasts and the need to help nonprofits who delivered emergency food, clothing and shelter services to the local poor.

By 2012 the revenue pinch for A Stepping Stone Foundation was acute. Donations were down and grants were almost nonexistent. I actually had agreed with the board on a date I would leave the foundation due to the bleak funding outlook. The plan was to close down our family literacy operations and run the Billie Gannaway Memorial Scholarship through volunteers.

Then there were a series of miracles–A Secret Millionaire chose our Westwood location to visit and contributed $50,000. The Pulliam Charitable Trust awarded us a life-saving three-year program grant and, while funding continues to be an uphill battle, we were able to continue delivering our important program services to local families and in fact are in turn-around now with plans of expansion.

We recently finished two separate three-year grants from the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation and The Bob and Renee Parsons Foundation.

Please tell us about A Stepping Stone Foundation.
A Stepping Stone Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which delivers high quality family literacy services as an intervention to prevent the cycle of inter-generational poverty caused by low or no education in the home environment. Our anchor program is relatively unchanged from that first year we delivered it in 1990.

While needy preschool-aged children attend a daily preschool, one or more of their full-time care-givers attends English and/or HSE (High School Equivalency prep classes, the “old” GED). These same care-givers agree to spend 32 hours each month not only attending those adult education classes, but they attend parenting classes, work in their child’s preschool class, open their homes monthly to home visits from their child’s teacher and participate in intentional inter-generational learning activities, too.

This is not a menu of choices. Families participate in it all–or not at all. If they do not keep an 80% attendance rate, they are asked to leave the program.

We have come to call this program LEAF-Literacy Elevates Arizona Families. We currently serve 40 families between two sites in collaboration with Alhambra Elementary and Isaac Elementary School Districts. We have also worked with Fowler and Murphy Districts—all in Phoenix.

We continue to run the Billie Gannaway Memorial Scholarship and a small internship program. Forty-two scholarships were awarded just last year and two former preschoolers currently work in the office as interns.

We are most proud of our inter-generational, whole-family approach and how we have kept in contact with so many of these amazing families. It is this whole family approach over time which sets us apart.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have:
-learned more sooner,
-gotten over my shyness for asking what I think the organization needed from day one,
-learned to acknowledge and embrace my fears, to sit with them and learn from them and
-I would have involved myself in the professional organizations which foster non-profit executives and fundraising expertise much sooner!

Organizations that have helped me learn, once I realized how much I didn’t know were ONE (Organization of Nonprofit Executives) and AFP (Associate of Fundraising Professionals) proved invaluable to me once I did join and attend the many learning workshops and seminars.

Pricing:

• While all services provided to children and families are at no-cost to them, it takes about $7,500 to put one family through our program for one program (school) year.
• We consider our unit of service to be one hour spent with any given family member–the cost of this AVERAGES out to be about $8.
• One day, we hope our average scholarship award will be about the price of tuition at a local college for the year (about $2,500).

Contact Info:

• Address: Our administrative office is located donated by Varitec and located at 2851 W. Kathleen, Phoenix, AZ 85053.
  Our teaching sites are located at:
  A Stepping Stone LEAF-Westwood
  4711 N. 23rd Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85015
  A Stepping Stone LEAF-Bret Tarver Isaac Preschool
  3101 W. McDowell Rd, Phoenix AZ 85009
• Website: www.asteppingstone.org
• Phone: 602-843-8281
• Email: cindy@asteppingstone.org
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ASteppingStoneFoundation/

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