Happy New Year from the Connect Me team!
We can all agree that this organization has achieved great things in the past year. To celebrate, our leadership team decided to host a new event to highlight each of our accomplishments in 2024: The State of the Nonprofit Address.
Making this an annual event on the first day of the new year, it is inspired by the US’s State of the Union Address, which is a message given by the U.S. President to members of the Congress. In the message, the President talks about important issues and offers their ideas on solving the nation’s problems.
Our new annual event highlights the accomplishments achieved in the past year and goes over some of our big plans in the next year. The State of the Nonprofit Address is hosted through Zoom, so it is open to everyone involved in Connect Me, including our tutors, students, and their parents.
While greeting our audience members and leading this event, our Secretary, Silvana Solsoloy, provided some background knowledge on the numbers our nonprofit holds, along with giving a brief overview of some of the major achievements and awards received since the nonprofit took off back in 2020.
“We have provided over 35,000 tutoring sessions worth over $700,000 in 39 states and 12 countries with a staff of over 500 team members. In the past, we’ve been featured on WEAU, ABC, WBMA, NBC, WNTC, & more. We won the NBC Making a Difference Award back in 2021, won the Senator’s Award in 2022, won the Be More Grant in 2024, and have won many more accolades over the years.”
Our Founder and Chair, Mehmet Tascioglu, shared some insightful words about his experience with starting Connect Me and gave congratulatory remarks to each of Connect Me’s team members. Before the organization was given money grants and donations through fundraisers, our Zoom meetings operated on the free plan, where meetings had a time limit of 40 minutes, cutting off the last 20 minutes for the full one-hour session.
“This address is short – only 20 minutes long. But that 20 minutes is so symbolic. It represents the 20 minutes that Connect Me tutors would lose in our early days, back when we had 40 minute free Zoom sessions and always got cut off before finishing the last 20 minutes with our student. We’ve come such a long way from that, and I’m excited to see what 2025 holds.”
Our External Vice President, Hasini Anand, then delivered the key accomplishments in the past year by highlighting our news appearances, our growth through our remarkable Connect Me chapters, our partnerships with social media influencers, and our new addition to the organization: MusicConnect. She also dove into the winning of our biggest grant yet: The NSHSS $10,000 Be More Grant.
“Over the past few years, we’ve been able to create so much change for free so we can’t wait to see how far this $10,000 grant will take us.”
Our current President, Ritvik Ellendula, prepared a speech of appreciation overviewing the concrete growth our organization embraced since the start of last year. He spoke about the “phenomenal advancements” that took place, including the numerous initiatives, the subcommittees that were created, and the tutor quality of life changes that have been implemented.
A couple of the initiatives mentioned were the Tutor Mentorship Program (where new tutors get mentored by Connect Me’s existing ones to learn the basics of being a tutor), and developing methodologies on the basis of the stressors many of our tutors tend to face as high school or college students.
“We hope that in 2025, we’ll go one step closer to being a tutoring frontrunner for every home in the world,” concluded Ritvik in his President’s speech.
Finally, our Internal Vice President, Aarav Shah, gave our audience a motivational speech. By digging into the history of his experience with Connect Me, he highlighted seeing the meaningful change and progress of the organization first-hand, and included some inspiring words about what our future holds.
“Now that the pandemic is largely over, we’ve redefined ourselves. We’re thinking bigger. Connect Me’s done a great job supporting its community, but it’s time to increase the scope of the people we serve. Over the last two years, we’ve redefined our “community” to be everybody.”
To end the 20-minute event, audience members were invited to take a group photo to capture the memories of our new tradition. As Aarav expressed in his speech, “To create a better tomorrow, we have to nurture the children of today.” With these words ringing in our hearts, Connect Me looks ahead into 2025 with excitement and determination, ready to make an even greater impact in the lives of those we serve.
Author: Diksha Lal
