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!
Water Balloon Event 2021
Ever played the game “Angry Birds”? We created two huge box towers and let teens attempt to knock them down with water balloon launchers! Of course it always ends with a big water ballon war, because, why not?
We also had fun with the giant beach ball!
Thanks to Celebrate Church, Knoxville for allowing us to borrow your 9-Square sets. The kids always love them!
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!
Creativity Challenge Winners
We are so IMPRESSED by all of the creative teens in our community. Our theme for this challenge was: HOPE: finding light in the darkness during 2020 and 2021. We were blown away by the beauty that these teens were able to capture and share with the world.
JUDGES
Our judges had a difficult job choosing a winner in each category. They took the time to look over every entry and provide encouraging feedback for each participant. (Feedback to every teen will be emailed out to them within a few days of this announcement). It was very important to our PvilleYI leadership team that judges came from outside of our team and board, since several of our team and volunteers have teens who wanted to participate.
THANK YOU to these wonderful people for being our Judges!
Anna Belzer
Carol Beier
Amy Core
Cass Lester
WINNERS
Here are the winners for our Spring 2021 Creativity Challenge! Each will receive a $100 cash prize. We will be in touch to get those prizes to you, winners!
Visual Art: SARAH MANN
Writing: ADONIAH KOENIG
The Girl With Her Hood UP
-Addie Koenig
Photography: JONAH SCHUMACHER
Music: ELIZABETH GOODALE
Dance: TARYN BRENT
Each of our participants will receive encouraging feedback from our judges, as well as being featured on our website! To see all of our entries, check out our Creativity Gallery!
Congrats to all our winners, and all participants! KEEP CREATING! We are SO proud of each and every teen!
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!
Prom & Party Dress Extravaganza!
We had an INCREDIBLE day at our Prom & Party Dress Extravaganza! Girls from Pleasantville and surrounding communities found the perfect dress with the help of our encouraging volunteers.
Prom is expensive. Anyone who has gone to one, or two, or more proms will tell you that finding a dress for a reasonable price is no easy task. For many girls, that perfect dress is out of reach because it is so expensive. This dress, worn for one night, can cost up to $500 or more. Half the battle for many girls is searching the clearance racks for something that will work. So we had this idea: what if people donated these hardly worn dresses and let any girl in the community feel beautiful wearing it? People responded with over 100 dresses being donated for this event. We were STUNNED at the outpouring of generosity!
Before we even opened the doors, girls were ready and waiting to shop. We had covered the walls of the Memorial Hall with encouraging messages about beauty and body positivity. There was a delicious table of treats and punch for them as they shopped.
Although getting girls a prom dress was the practical purpose for this event, we had an even bigger goal in mind. We wanted to shower these young women with kindness and encouragement. We wanted them to feel beautiful inside and out. Our volunteers helped girls search for dresses, urging them to “give this one a try”. Some girls were very shy, even saying, “no, that will not look good on me.” Our volunteers kept up the encouragement and many times, that dress that a girl thought would “never work for me”, was the one they walked out with. Their eyes lit up as they suddenly looked at themselves differently. Moms beamed, dads held back tears, and the girls were radiant. Sure, true beauty is on the inside, but these girls needed to know that they ARE beautiful on the outside too.
Each girl also received a swag bag full of little gifts from us and local businesses, and a chance to win a raffle prize! Thank you to AvaLayne Hair Studio, Chiropractic Hut, Jen for the Massage, Chelsea Bender and Kirsten Furnal for Young Living Makeup sets, Lakefront Living Custom Engraving and Gifts, The Well-Knoxville, Jennifer Holdredge for the Mary Kay samples, Jessica Haigins for the paparazzi jewelry donation, Pleasant Hill Dry Cleaners for the plastic dress bags, and all those who donated dresses and jewelry to make this happen!
This event gave a free dress to every Pleasantville girl who wanted one, in addition to a free piece of jewelry. Girls from surrounding communities, or women searching for a dress for our Prom Throwback (for Adults!) fundraiser coming up April 25th, could get a dress for $25.00. Originally we had planned to donate half of the proceeds from those purchases to Pleasantville’s After Prom, but after talking about it with our team, we decided all $400 we took in would be donated to After Prom. Why? Because we just love those kids, and want them to have an AMAZING time at Prom!
All dresses that were not given away or sold were donated to The Well in Knoxville, where girls can still go and shop for a dress!
We are so excited to continue to bless Pleasantville’s youth in more and more ways. We hope the girls who attended felt that we truly believe they matter to us, and to God. Watch the full highlight video here.
Christmas Party 2019
Hot Chocolate, popcorn, music, and gifts? What more could a kid ask for! On December 14th, 2019 we hosted our first ever Christmas party for 7th-12th graders. It was a blast!
This event was different than events we have done in the past. Rather than just being a hang out night, this event brought the kids center-stage for a series of fun activities including a Christmas Tree making contest, a lip sync battle, and a Christmas Q&A.
The highlight of the night for PvilleYI volunteers was handing out a gift to every kid. Everyone got the same thing: a brown box containing gummy bears, takis (chips), a PvilleYI bracelet, a PvilleYI decal sticker that says “Every Person Matters”, a few pieces of candy, a candy cane, a pack of gum, and a really cozy pair of LazyOne Christmas Socks! Every gift was wrapped and a bow was placed on top. Why go to all the trouble to wrap all these presents? Because unwrapping gifts is SO much fun!
Ultimately our goal behind giving each kid a gift is simple: They matter to us. And when people matter to you, you go the extra mile and show them that you care in tangible ways. God gives to us in such a lavish way. We didn’t really need the color purple, but He gave it to us anyway. We didn’t really need a singing bird outside our window, but He gave it to us anyway. These kids might not need these gifts in the same way that they need their survival needs met. But we gave them to them anyway. Because good gifts make life special, worth enjoying, just like a C chord or a chocolate chip cookie. It’s a small way to bring joy. And small things add up.
The youth surprised us all by counting to three and in a unified voice expressing thanks.
On Christmas God gave us the most beautiful gift of all: His Son, Jesus, the Prince of Peace. And we want to love the way He does!
Merry Christmas!
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:
Post Game Party 2019
What an awesome night with a bunch of great kids! We invited 7th-12th graders to a post game party on October 25th, 2019. After the football game youth began flooding into the High School Cafeteria. When they arrived they signed in with our volunteers and headed in for snacks, drinks, and dancing!
One thing is for sure: there was a lot of laughing at this event. One of the highlights for us occurred during the song “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Completely on their own, the entire group circled up to sing the song. Then they came together in the center for the chorus. It was encouraging to see all of them in sync for a moment. Clicks faded, divisions fell away, and they were just one big circle.
We love doing events like these because we see so many smiles. Life won’t always be easy or fun for these kids. But it is our hope that we can offer some enjoyment, some laughter, some fun that will help outweigh the bad days. God loves us so much and freely gives us good things. He asks us to love others the same way. So what we love to give them is a few hours of happiness. For a little while they are just kids having fun, wearing funny hats in front of a camera, and singing at the top of their lungs. Loved dearly by God, by us, and by their community.
We want to thank all our volunteers for this event. We couldn’t do it without you! Thank you also to PHS for allowing us to use the school facility. Thanks to Autumn Fennewald at Sweet Serendipity Photography for taking photos at the photo booth. She has a great eye! Thank you to Cass Lester for DJing for us again. He knows how to get the crowd moving! And a shout out to the Booster Club for bringing over a pile of delicious pork sandwiches, the kids were thrilled and so were the volunteers!
Although this was a 7th-12th grade event, we had very few high school students attend. We sort of expected that, but we wanted to try one more time to keep it open. We are taking notes about these things and plan to make some changes to future events, separating the age groups and finding unique ways to bless the high school students in Pleasantville as much as we are blessing the Middle Schoolers.
You can see a highlight video below!
If you would like to donate to help us throw more fun events like these, you can learn how here!
And just for fun, here’s the prep video from Emily and Jennie as well! :)