Thank you to everyone who came out to help us celebrate our 50th birthday on October 19th. Our dedicated staff, volunteers, and participants spent many months planning a wonderful event for the community to enjoy, and all that hard work paid off—we couldn’t have asked for a more successful day! In the words of one attendee:
“I am one of the uke players from Saturday and just wanted to let you know what a great job you did in organizing the event. There were so many things to do for adults as well as children. But nothing was over choreographed. The Stanford band was just genius. They really revved everyone up. I didn’t see anyone who wasn’t smiling and moving to their music. And people came over from University Avenue to check out what was happening. I’ve been to many celebrations like this over the years, but yours takes the cake! Well done!”
Also in October, I celebrated my fifth anniversary as President and CEO of Avenidas, and I am proud to look back and marvel at all that we’ve accomplished over the past five years. When I was hired, we were just embarking on what we thought would be a $12M capital project and campaign for Avenidas. Over the next few years, that project evolved into a $20M undertaking, a fundraising goal we were able to hit due to the generous support of so many community donors.
This ultimately led to the beautiful new state-of-the-art, age-friendly facility at 450 Bryant Street, which we can now fill with dozens of more programs and services.
At the same time, we have grown to nearly full capacity at our Avenidas Rose Kleiner Adult Day Health facility in Mountain View, and we have held on to space at Cubberley to expand our new Avenidas Blooms and Avenidas Chinese Community Center programs.
In 2020, we will focus on expanding Avenidas Transportation Services. We will ramp up our partnership with Catered Too by offering healthy cooking demonstrations and nutrition classes in The Redwood café. And we will grow the number of tech-related classes and activities being offered at Senior Planet@Avenidas. Our growth has been phenomenal, and it will continue in the months and years ahead as we gear up to serve even more older adults in the community.
Thank you for being part of this exciting journey with us! Have a joyous holiday season, and we’ll see you in the new year.