Denver Home Living from Your Colorado Home Group Fall 2018 | Page 28

RAFT
COLORADO
RAFTCOLORADO.ORG
RAFT CONNECTS THOUSANDS OF COLORADO TEACHERS WITH
INSPIRATION AND AFFORDABLE RESOURCES FOR HANDS-ON LEARNING
C
olorado teachers are known for going “above and
beyond” for the sake of their students, and nowhere
is this more evident than at the Colorado RAFT
headquarters, located on the northern outskirts of
Denver. There, you will find self-proclaimed Dumpster Diver and
Executive Director Stephanie Welsh and her crew hard at work
developing hands-on learning materials and activities to support
Colorado teachers. Although these materials are all affordable, they
are high-quality teaching tools providing immeasurable benefits to
students. Says Welsh, “Even teachers with excellent resources from
their community depend on us for creative ideas and materials that
will enhance student learning.” In 2016 alone, RAFT—short for
“Resource Area for Teaching”—impacted over 270,000 students in
25 counties across Colorado.
Welsh began her career as an attorney at a large Denver law firm and
then worked as a corporate lawyer for a national childcare company for
several years. When local philanthropists Carrie and John Morgridge
happened to visit the original RAFT office in San Jose, California,
their vision for a local branch serving Colorado teachers was born.
After some initial research into the idea, a hiring committee was
established and Welsh—who had become involved with educational
issues while her children were in school—was chosen to help develop
and lead the organization. RAFT Colorado opened its doors in 2009,
with the guiding mission “teachers come first,” or as Welsh says with
conviction, “We’ll do whatever we can to help them.”
This singularity of purpose helped the organization reach over 4,000
teachers last year, although the precise number is hard to measure since
many materials are shared with other teachers and classrooms. There
are three divisions to RAFT: one that prepares time-saving activity
kits—complete with detailed teaching guides—for students; a second
that provides hands-on consulting services and affordable materials for
teachers; and a third that offers professional development training and
online resources for teachers. RAFT is located close to major highways
to serve the maximum possible student population. Over half of its
members are from districts where most students qualify for free or
reduced lunch. Yet there is also a RAFT-On-Wheels component that
delivers these same programs to schools in rural communities that
don’t have the ability to access RAFT materials on their own.
Staff members—most of whom are teachers themselves—are trained
in developing creative, hands-on programs for children to meet
specific curriculum requirements. They often work directly with
individual teachers to help design custom activities to teach particular
subjects. “Project-based learning helps children build essential skills,
like vocabulary, expressive language skills, and life skills,” says Welsh.
“In the world of artificial intelligence, everyone’s realizing how
important creative learning is.”
Generous corporate donors deliver pallets of everyday materials—
cardboard tubes, fabric, foam, manufacturing by-products, jewel
cases, and other items that are not even recognizable—which Welsh’s
team incorporates into various activity kits. RAFT’s “re-imagineers”
encourage teachers to look at objects for their attributes as opposed to
their intended purposes.
“A basic cardboard tube can be cut in half vertically and used to build
a ramp in a lesson about gravity, force, and motion, while a CD can
be used as wheels or as a base for a hovercraft,” says Welsh. “Through
RAFT’s hands-on programs, students learn problem-solving skills,
using cause-and-effect to figure out how items around them can
impact one another.”
Despite its success, Welsh does
acknowledge the organization’s
challenges. “Our business model is
expensive,” she says. “We need a lot
of space and support to execute our
programming, and of course, pay rent
and salaries.” Since today’s teachers are
so inundated with job responsibilities,
the organization tries to spread word
of its services primarily by connecting
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