May baskets 2024
HAPPY MAY DAY! We dropped off 500 May Baskets at the elementary school on May 1st! Thanks to our helpers, and a special thanks to the Young Adult group at Celebrate Church for volunteering your group time to assemble these with us! Many teachers and parents reached out to share their appreciate for this small act of kindness. We believe infusing even small moments of joy in chidlren’s lives can make a HUGE difference!
Prom Prep morning 2024
We had a fantastic morning spoiling Pleasantville’s prom attendee girls! All young women attending prom were invited to stop by the Memorial Hall to grab an iced coffee or juice, some delicious carbohydrates from Panera Bread, and a goody bag from us! Bags were filled with prom day essentials like lip gloss, gum, bandaids, tissues, hair clips, and more.
Girls were also invited to reserve an appointment to have their hair or makeup done for free by talented volunteers! The spots filled up fast, but we also had volunteers on hand for walk-ins.
We had a great morning encouraging these young women with some pampering and fun!
Happy May Day! 2023
We delivered our annual May Baskets to the elementary school on May 1st! 600 little bags of fun for each student. Little surprises bring a lot of joy to life, don’t they!
Homecoming Tailgate 2021
LET’S GO TROJANS! PvilleYI had a BLAST pre-gaming with the community! We served free Orange Crush Slushies and shared about our upcoming building project. We love getting out in the community and spreading joy!
Thanks to the Pleasantville Betterment Organization for putting on such a FUN event. We were so excited to participate!
Thank you to Bruce Crozier and Celebrate Youth at Celebrate Church, Knoxville for letting us borrow your EPIC slushy machine!
Middle School Dance Night 2021
What a FUN time we had at the Middle School Dance Night!
85% of Pleasantville’s 7th and 8th graders attended. We are blown away and humbled by that!
Teens enjoyed dance music, orange crush slushes, a mountain of Little Debbie snack cakes, every kind of Mountain Dew known to man, and of course we had water and bananas available, too!
Thank you to the City of Pleasantville for allowing us to use the Memorial Hall for this fun event!
We also want to thank Cass Lester at Central Iowa DJ for keeping the night humming along with awesome dance tunes.
And another big shout out to Bruce at Celebrate Church in Knoxville for letting us borrow the slushy machine!
Post Game Party 2021
Well that was fun! We had a BLAST at our 2021 Post Game Party!
We welcomed over 100 teens at our after game event.
Students had a blast dancing, eating snacks, and hanging out with their friends!
Thanks to Pleasantville Schools for letting us have our event in the PHS cafeteria! We are your BIGGEST fans!
Also thanks to Cass Lester at Central Iowa DJ for keeping the teens happy with tons of awesome music!
Competition For Kids Who Like Games 2021
It was SO great to actually get to have an IN PERSON event again! Covid has been hard for all of us. Thankfully we were able to have this outdoor event and have some fun!
Teens were split into teams and given a team color with matching bandana. Each team came up with a funny name, and team identity!
Teams competed in a bunch of games curated to match the different levels of interest of teens. From Basketball to Dodgeball to Improv and Trivia, there was a little something for everyone!
We had a GREAT time!
Thanks so much to all our volunteers! And thank you to Celebrate Church, Knoxville for lending us your 9-Square sets!
May Day 2020: Over 600 May Baskets!
On May 1st, 2020, we handed out and delivered 600 May Baskets to our community! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we adjusted our plans to be extra careful.
Volunteers put together and filled the baskets with candy and some flower seeds to plant!
We met at Shadle Park in Pleasantville and began a drive-thru May Day Basket pick up. Of course we dressed up in fun costumes and had music playing! Everyone needed a boost of HAPPY after so much time in quarantine.
After our drive-thru time ended, we left the baskets we had left at random homes around Pleasantville.
We had so much fun bringing back this fantastic tradition!
CFKWLG 2019 Was a Blast!
On November 23rd we hosted our second “Competition for Kids Who Like Games (and also for kids who do not like games)", or CFKWLG.
Competing can be a lot of fun. Some kids are naturally tuned to enjoy athletics, while others are not. And that is OK! Take our co-founders for example. Emily loves an intense game of dodgeball or basketball. Jennie, however, prefers trivia and creative challenges. Both enjoy competing, but not in the same way.
We created this event to appeal to both of these personality types. Learning to enjoy winning and losing, understanding that playing by the rules makes a victory sweeter, and working together with others toward a common goal are all important skills kids will need as adults. At this age, kids still learn a lot through play.
We wanted kids to understand that in life they won’t be on a team full of people who are exactly like them. At work, and even in their families, they’ll have to learn how to let someone else on their team shine so they can all find success. One minute a team is cheering their teammate who won them the dodgeball game, and the next they’re cheering the teammate who earned them 3 points in trivia. Everyone contributes.
As youth arrived and signed in they were divided into four different teams at random, each team assigned a different color: Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue.
Teams each had two volunteers as coaches. Together they came up with their team names and their team battlecries. We encouraged them to be as creative and silly as they wanted to be!
The teams chose the following names:
Yellow Team: The Millertary (named after Colton Miller)
Red Team: The Rojo Toros
Blue Team: The Blue Ice Giraffes
Green Team: The Turtle Strips
The teams competed in a series of games. We choose games that athletes and non-athletes alike can find a way to enjoy including some trivia, a dance-off, and dodgeball. By including games that appeal to different types of personalities, we were able to give each kid on the team a chance to contribute to the points their team earned.
Note: We used “regulation” dodgeballs (because apparently that’s a thing). They are supposed to sting less when a player is hit with them and be more fun to use.
The winner of the CFKWLG traveling trophy this year was the Blue Ice Giraffes!
Kids ended the evening with some candy bars and time to hang out together.
Events like this encourage teamwork and friendship. Competition can be a lot of fun when you play fair and laugh with your opponents. We hope the kids learned a little bit about teamwork, too.
We had a great time! A huge thank you to all of our volunteers: Stacy Rowson, Kirsten Furnal, Greg Eichenburg, Clinton Wallace, Eric Goodale, Mike & Emily Caulkins, and Jennie & Michael Koenig. You can watch the highlight video below:
Giant Angry Birds Game
What do water balloons, stacks of boxes, and 500ft sling shots get you? GIANT ANGRY BIRDS GAME! And we had FUN! The youth chose to split up in boys vs girls teams and battle it out by launching water balloons at each other’s box towers, trying to knock them down and pop huge water balloons hidden inside them. It was a ton of fun. Everyone got a bottle of water and an icecream bar in between games. When we were finished, everyone worked together to pick up every single water balloon piece in the grass. What an awesome group of kids!
And of course, it ended with a pretty epic water balloon fight!