My Message

In honor of black history month (February), which is my first February with Children’s Home society. I wrote the email below in hopes that my grandmother would pass it down through our church announcements to invite those from back home to help out with CHS’ Equity Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) movement.

Greetings church family and friends, if my grandma didn’t tell you who this email is from by now, my name is Courtney and I am pastor Braziel’s great niece. Currently I am 20 years old starting the spring semester of my second year at UCF. This semester I was tasked with volunteering, studying, and documenting my journey as I volunteer becoming closer to the Children’s Home Society’s family.

For a little background , CHS started in 1902 with Reverend DW Comstock and various community leaders opening the doors of this organization to provide a “family” for children who had nowhere else to go. Since then that group of community leaders had turned into over a thousand members helping 80K+ children and family members yearly, and  supporting families in nearly all regions of Florida.

In hopes of completing our mission to “build bridges to success for children” CHS offers services from counseling, to remote volunteering, and even in the fields of mentoring children AND their families.

The first step to building those bridges between families and friends is that acronym EDI!! When partnering with different families and organizations the beauty of diversity comes like laces to sneakers which need to be tied and cared for properly if we wanna win this 5k called life. As the saying goes we have strength in numbers, but in order to be strong together we need to learn from one another and understand that our needs and challenges is the key to getting the top solutions and support in our mission

I may know that diversity is beautiful and needed just as well as you all do but there are still some who don’t quite understand it which causes others, especially those that are younger and very impressionable, to believe that it is a bad thing. In order to turn things around, I humbly ask for your help.

Here are a few ways to help:

1. You could donate to expanding our EDI efforts at chsfl.org/donate
2. You can join our team by going to www.chsfl.org/careers
3. You can participate in remote volunteering like making therapy/self care kits or affirmation jars and either drop them off to your local CHS office or I can pick them up on one of my many trips home and bring them back to Orlando
4. You can join the mentoring team
5. Or if my email has inspired you, CHS would LOVE to hear about it at CHSEFI@chsfl.org
6. And last but not least if you don’t know how to help you can always contact my grandma or myself personally

Thank you for taking the time to listen to my looooong letter. I hope it finds you all well. I also hope my words have reached each and every one of you in some way.

                                                     Love, Baby Courtney