At school: Maria Baumer, La Casa de Esperanza VP of community engagement Maria del Pilar Wadina, school president and CEO Shari Campbell, Rodney, enrollment specialist Maria Carrillo, and Erika.
Student and teachers at Waukesha’s La Casa de Esperanza charter school are well prepared for classes to begin, thanks to an act of kindness from video teller Erika Garcia.
Erika was one of ten North Shore Bank employees recently given funds to put toward a good cause, as part of our ongoing Bank on Kindness initiative. She took the money and purchased supplies from La Casa de Esperanza’s wish list: 192 pencils, 144 pencil sharpeners, 96 pairs of scissors, 120 rulers, 214 glue sticks, 103 markers, and 100 colored pencils.
The school’s music room.
“La Casa de Esperanza has so many great programs and does a lot for the Waukesha community,” she said. Besides offering classes, the school also helps community members with things like counseling and homebuying. “I wanted to do something for them, even if it was small. I know teachers often spend their own money on supplies and figured this would be a nice way to take a load off them.”
Erika, Brookfield Square manager Maria Baumer, and video teller manager Rodney Whiteside personally delivered the new supplies to La Casa de Esperanza and spent about 45 minutes touring the school, which has programs for kids as young as 6 weeks all the way up to, starting this year, seventh grade. “Each year they open up space for a new grade and keep growing the school,” Erika said, noting that 235 students are enrolled this fall.
The art room at La Casa de Esperanza.
“Erika did a wonderful job researching where she wanted to use her Bank on Kindness funds on,” Maria said. “She loves kids and took this opportunity very seriously! We heard from the educators at La Casa de Esperanza how important donations are to them. Many families don’t have the means to buy school supplies, and our donation helped fill in those gaps.”
Muskego rewards kindness with ice cream
The Muskego branch also took part in Bank on Kindness this month, partnering with Board Together, a local business that serves ice cream and other treats and offers rustic board painting and similar craft workshops.
These sisters wrote letters and made drawings (see below) to send to their grandmother’s former neighbor, who just moved away. “They are going to mail them to the neighbor at the new address to make her day,” Stephanie said.
“We purchased 20 scoops of ice cream from the shop. For a child to get a free scoop, they have to do some sort of act of kindness — taking out the neighbors’ trash, bringing an unreturned shopping cart back to the cart rack, that kind of thing,” community engagement manager AVP Stephanie Ruiz said. These acts of kindness must be performed for people who aren’t family members of friends. “Once they complete their act of kindness, they stop by the branch, show us what they did, and we give them a coupon to take back to Board Together.”
She added: “I’m letting the little kids count their coins for free, too. Every kid loves the coin machine!”
Both the branch and Board Together are getting some good foot traffic from the promotion, Stephanie said.