Information on the Spring House Resource
From the Spring House Website:
"Spring House Resource is a source of support for students, teachers, and communities on the Flathead Reservation to help all students in publicly funded schools reach their academic goals and potential. Spring House raises money in order to provide micro grants and services directly to students, classrooms, and community agencies based on need and application."
Who's Involved? What's Their Mission?
Anna Baldwin, founder of the Spring House Resource, has been a teacher on the Flathead reservation for 22 years.
She recognizes that there are things that students and teachers need that they don’t get, not necessarily because of economic disadvantages, but because they don’t know where to look for the appropriate resources to make a difference in their communities.
That’s the mission of the Spring House, according to Baldwin. To “Meet the needs of teachers and students in ways that will enhance their academics and their community commitment.”
How Does it Work?
Spring House will receive help from foundations like the Arlee CDC, a community development program based in a region of the Flathead Reservation, as well as private donations from individuals. Spring House also organize fundraisers to raise money, including their Run for Spring 5k/10k, which was a lively event similar to what we have envisioned for the 5k for Flathead.
More Information on the Arlee CDC
Once Spring House receives a sum of money they break it up and distribute it as micro-loans to multiple groups of students and teachers that have applied for resources for various reasons.
According to Baldwin, one of the harder steps after getting the funds is getting people to use them. If not many people have applied for use of the money, Baldwin will reach out to teachers she knows in the community and encourage them to take advantage of the Spring House Resource for projects their students are working on.
Who's Affected?
Grants typically go to groups of students for individual projects that work on bettering their community.
Here are some examples of the types of projects Spring House funds.
Young people are full of incredible ideas but they often lack access to funding. For example, one young woman who wanted to bring attention to missing and murdered indigenous women made a skirt by hand every day of her senior year of high school. This is an example of a project eligible for micro-loans.
A class of twelve kids, working on projects in groups of two or three, applied for grants. Each group used the money from their grant to help support the elders at a local nursing home, who they had made connections with as a part of their projects. Connections were sometimes in the form of letters sent back and forth, and sometimes in the form of exchanging gifts.
One teacher wanted to teach her students about entrepreneurship, so they built and painted flower boxes to then sell. They purchased the building materials, soil and plants from local shops, and then figured out what the markup should be based on the amount of money that had been spent on resources. In this way the students involved learned about business transactions, how to calculate and estimate fair profit margins, and the difficulties of selling and marketing ones own product.
To learn more about what type of projects the spring house helps fund, visit the “Results” tab if their website.
Where Do We Go From Here?
IGSS had the good fortune of getting to speak with Anna Baldwin. We asked her how she hopes to see the Spring House Resource grow and improve, to which she responded that she'd love to see the organization become big enough to the point where they can sponsor larger-level projects that will have more of a dramatic impact on the community. Eventually, she'd like to see the Spring House providing community outreach services to the people of the Flathead Reservation, as well as educate people and spread awareness on important issues such as water rights, and one day even have a foot in local policy change.
