Would you like to impact the total well-being and mental health of thousands of children and parents in your community at once? 

Become a donor, sponsor, or marketing partner and direct your social impact or marketing dollars to the MACARONI AND CHEESE program for the schools in your district. Gift the implementation of this program with all materials to elementary schools in your school district so that you can impact Kindergarten - 5th grade with a powerful and effective emotional intelligence and literacy curriculum delivered via reading, music, art, and play. Provide the parents in your community with a tool for their conscious parenting. With your funding of this program, each school's Kindergarten - 5th grade class will participate in a 45-90 minute student workshop (music, art, story-telling/writing) led by one of our facilitators AND go home with their own signed hardcover copy of MACARONI AND CHEESE, Vol 1, a custom MC bookmark and a workbook too!

Workshops are designed to be a program from which the parents and teachers can pivot throughout the school year for their emotional intelligence and reading material in one.  You may gift our program by donating to our fiscal sponsor, national non-profit literacy organization 501(c)(3), KIDS NEED TO READ to gift one or all the schools in your district with the MAC AND CHEESE program, or you may sponsor and partner with us directly. The size of your donation will determine how many kids we can include at a fixed price per child.

How many kids? Elementary schools usually have 130-700 kids (Kindergarten-5th grade.) Sometimes sponsorship allows us to do a few grades instead of a whole school, but our goal is do an entire school and then a complete school district. Our largest school to date was an LAUSD school with 760 kids and the principal purchased the program for all six grades!  Macaroni and Cheese week lasted two solid weeks. I workshopped three classes a day and led three parent education workshops too. Even the school psychologist requested a copy of the book/CD! Now, all the teachers can use the content from which to pivot into other social emotional class lessons.

One 3rd grade teacher did this right away and then invited me back to have the students present their projects. He chose to focus on the entrepreneurial aspect of my story so that he could introduce the kid to the concept of Intellectual Property. He then tasked each of them with creating a marketing tool for this volume and asked them to try to imagine how they would go about getting it into market. Genius! See some of those creations here:

We come armed with all the art supplies, music, and interactive ideas! The kids are ignited by the experience and go home with activities to do, stories to read, and music to sing, dance, and play along to. 

The activities included in the book were written with input from educators and can be done with or without parents, but offer a wonderful opportunity for parent/child interaction in and around abstract concepts such as cultivating gratitude, self-esteem, and being your best in every moment regardless of what the rest of the world is doing. 

Parent Education: While I am sure we can all agree that a parent's modeling of an emotionally intelligent lifestyle is the most effective way to invite a child to learn to live from a place of compassion, empathy, kindness, consideration, and service, that does not happen all of the time in many families. Many parents are not yet healed themselves before starting their parenting journey, so modeling this awareness is not always realistic. The Mac and Cheese content is a tool meant to support parents in their conscious parenting by helping to lay a foundation for an emotionally intelligent child to thrive. We offer Parent Ed Workshops as well.

Simultaneously this program is a literacy tool with provocative vocabulary that prompts conversation and awareness of these concepts that can then be integrated into the daily life of the family with fun. It is the gift that keeps on giving for years because this content is most enjoyed by 4-10 yr olds, which is the Lexile Measurement we were given. 

How impactful is it? I am always humbled when the recess bell rings at the end of one of my workshops and all the kids rush to the door awaiting their coveted playground time, and with my own eyes, I have seen kids opt to sit on the playground reading copies of their new books out loud to each other instead of playing a game on the playground. This is simply because they are excited (read: ignited) by the interactive experience they have just had in workshop. I am confident that when these kids take their new book and audio home after having had their own personal experience (one of the Common Core criteria,) they are motivated to gobble up the Macaroni and Cheese content at home as well. The result will be these kids having an imprint of concepts (gratitude and empathy) early on in a positive and joyful way. Even if it is not being modeled in their home by their own parents, they will be learning it here, with the Macaroni and Cheese Anthology.

In order to create continuity and follow through of our content, we now have a workbook available as a companion piece, as well as something called Macaroni and Cheese Mondays… ask us about that.

Whether the gift giver is an individual or a corporation, we tailor your gift to match either one small group or we combine your gift with others’ gifts to do several grades, a whole school, or hopefully a whole school district. At a fixed price per child we match up the grant requests made through our fiscal partner, KIDS NEED TO READ, to address the greatest need for books and interactive programs such as ours at schools where 80-100% of the students come from families below poverty level. Some kids have no books in their homes at all, let alone music, audio stories, and play activities to match. If the parents are ESL, they can use our stories, songs, and activities to learn a social emotional vocabulary themselves that will support them in their parenting bilingual kids too.

If you have a specific school, group, or district you would like to receive our program, you are welcome to direct us there too.

Make an impact with Macaroni and Cheese Anthology.

Take it to the Next Level

For the corporate sponsors/partners who want to take it to the next level, the remaining 5 volumes of MACARONI AND CHEESE (Anthology)  and workbooks could bear the name of the corporation on any or all for which they fund publishing costs. Following the publish, a portion of those sponsorship funds will also be used to implement the program into schools with workshops, book/cds, workbooks for schools in the district where the corporation is based or of their choosing.