While programs for educational development are certainly needed in every community, Feed My Sheep Resource Center, Inc is working to help the people of East Chicago in a different way.
Feed My Sheep is an organization that was started by Cheryl Smith in 2013. Smith had spent many years figuring out how she could be of the most benefit to the community when she finally realized that she wanted to help people learn how to help themselves.
Feed My Sheep works to help people help themselves by promoting confidence, social skills and other self-sufficiency skills through their community programs.
One of Feed My Sheep’s most successful programs to date is PEARLS which stands for Poised, Educated Adolescents Reaching for Life’s Successes. PEARLS works with young girls ages 9-14 to help them increase their self-esteem and set them up for success into adulthood.
Feed My Sheep also has proposed several other programs that it hopes to implement within the community in the future.
CLEAR, which stands for Continuously Learning, Experiencing and Appreciating Reading, is a program that will help individuals improve their literacy skills. The program will be accessible by individuals of all ages but will primarily focus on those of early childhood. The idea behind this program is that building a solid foundation of literacy skills will open up more doors later on in life.
Another proposed program is 4 Kids By Kids which will consist of a group of children that puts out a quarterly newsletter geared towards other kids in the community. This Feed My Sheep program will teach kids about reading, writing and media while focusing on information that is of interest to them.
The final program that Feed My Sheep is proposing is called YOU, which stands for Young and Old United. This program will aim to link children with older adults through activities that foster growth and friendship across generations.
Feed My Sheep hopes to implement these programs in the near future in order to maximize its effect on and benefit of the community of East Chicago.
