Educating the Educators

We’re a small non-profit organization that provides an annual PE professional development conference for PE Specialists, classroom teachers and administrators. This conference is more important than ever because districts are cutting elementary PE programs and relying on classroom teachers (no PE training) to do PE. They can get training from us. And we’ve seen the devastating effects Covid has had for our youth. Many spent the better part of two years sitting and playing video games. A good PE program will teach physical skills, social skills, cooperation and team building and help build confident and competent movers. These skills translate into physically active adults for life. Covid shut down our conference but we were able to work as a team (we are all volunteers) and zig zag a bit to offer a free online virtual conference for the next two years. It was very beneficial for many, many teachers as they were all struggling to learn to teach in this new online format and needed the support and training we could offer. The Covid shut down caused the loss of our previous conference location. We’ve found a new location but moving and getting established, and becoming our own non-profit organization, whereas before we were under a university, has been an expensive endeavor. As we continue to try to rebuild, we take great pride in offering sessions by the best PE teachers from all over, many of whom are teachers of the year in their area. We, unlike other organizations, pay our presenters. The focus of this crowdfunding project would be to raise the money to bring in and pay these top presenters we would like to bring to our attendees. The estimated cost and fundraising goal is $6,000. Raising $5,000-$6,000 would take some pressure off and allow my organization, the K-8 Elementary Physical Education Workshop (EPEW) to get re-established in our new location. This is EPEW’s 50th anniversary and our organization is loved and respected in the PE community. This is primarily because, besides offering a high-quality conference, we take care of our presenters and attendees. Our unofficial slogan is “Come to learn, leave as family.” Each year we have a different theme and for 2023 it is “Launching into the Phys Ed Future: Physical Literacy for All” with a space motif (see attached logo). We have a focus this year in bringing more diversity and gender equity into our PE programs and we have speakers in these areas lined up. For example, we specially chose an astronaut as part of our logo because the astronaut is non-gender specific. As an all-volunteer organization made up of PE teachers working full time, we could use your expertise in getting the crowdfunding project going. I am including the link to our website so you can see who we are: [login to view URL] I hope you might be interested in helping us.