A number of Creighton School District’s schools have experienced the difficulty of starting a successful Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) first hand. Yet we all recognize that successful PTOs are an incredible asset to their schools and communities. Through effective fund raising and collective effort, we’ve seen PTOs easily equip their schools with important and lasting assets; items like new playground equipment, library resources, projectors, digital learning tools, and more.

Just as importantly, effective PTOs are tremendous interfaces between our schools and communities. Effective PTOs increase the visibility and goodwill of our schools through on-going interaction with the business community and surrounding neighborhoods. This community interaction in turn increases not only the support for our schools, but also their accountability, thereby ensuring that our schools have effective and lasting impact for their communities.

But starting a PTO is hard work. It takes a simultaneous focus on organization leadership, recruiting, and business development, while also seemingly “inventing the wheel” when it comes to how a PTO should manage itself.

With an eye on these challenges, and the importance of PTOs, Creighton Community Foundation’s PTO Incubator Program is designed to equip our schools with the initial guidance, talent, and financial resources to start up PTOs that have a better chance at achieving sustainability that lasts across multiple generations of parents. This program is designed as seed funding for the first year of a beginning PTO, while also equipping PTO volunteers with outside expertise and advisory services to help PTOs get well established in their first year. In a consultative engagement, CCF and key community members will help beginning PTOs build a successful track record of effective community engagement, perpetual fund raising, and well governed transitions with the intention of better equipping our schools with these important organizations.

Are you just starting a PTO at one of our District schools? Reach out to us at info@creightoncommunityfoundation.org.

Do you know a teacher? Do you see a specific need? Creighton Community Foundations’ Targeted Needs Fund exists so donors with specific giving desires can meet just about any need they’ve identified across the District. Additionally, as an alternative to third party organizations like Donors Choose, our Targeted Needs Fund can allow teachers to solicit for charitable funds for specific needs where donors already exist, without the overhead costs of making donations through networks like Donors Choose (we’ve seen small projects encounter Donors Choose costs of 35% to 50% of the project budget). At our inception in 2015, Creighton Community Foundation established this fund to make the most effective use of our community’s dollars, with maximum flexibility for meeting classroom needs.

Creighton Community Foundation recognizes that many community members and business partners desire the ability to equip our District with specific assets such as technology equipment, furnishings, the execution of projects, gifts of various types of capital equipment, or other specific types of donations. For this purpose, Creighton Community Foundation established the Strategic Assets Fund to allow generous donors and partners to provide specific solutions to Creighton School District in consultation with the Creighton Community Foundation.