Special ROL Announcement Print
Program News
Written by Press Release   
Friday, 08 August 2008 00:00

Dear Road of Life Supporter,

 It is with great excitement that I write to you with the next chapter in the history of Road of Life.

As you all know, we are an organization that lives and breathes results. Since launching version 3.0 of our classroom curriculum, we have served over 110,000 children internationally and generating over an estimated $33 million social return on investment. These results are simply amazing, and credit is due to our diligent staff of Shane Hankins, Rosa Jung, Margo Roberts, Anuprit Kaur, and Sarah Mase.

I want to take just a moment to reflect how we got here as an organization. Around 2003, when we committed to developing prevention curriculum, we took a enormous risk based on the best evidence we could find. We believed that teachers would embrace high quality, free, materials that met their state academic content standards. We asked our supporters to invest their time, and ideas, and money into that concept. You all believed in us, and with your help we have had achieved staggering change for thousands of children.

As we do annually at our board retreat we returned to questions like: Why do we exist? How can we maximize our impact? What are our strengths? What are our areas of weakness? What are our priorities?

We focused our resolve to make kids healthy – preventing cancer and other diseases. At this time our strength is in our elementary curriculum (impacting kids in 2nd – 5th grades) – and making that accessible anywhere and everywhere learning is taking place. We also have a very strong and successful online presence and community of educators, parents and community leaders from around the country.

Our online community will be a major focal point for us in the coming year. We recently closed our Columbus office to correspond with a more ‘virtual’ working environment and culture that we’ve developed over the past two years with team members and volunteers throughout the country. We will be putting these office costs toward impacting more kids and distributing the curriculum. We will also increase our investment in our online presence and online community to bring together thousands of committed stakeholders and educators from around the country.

With these actions we are well on our way to impact and change the lives of 1 million kids over the next five years.

Finally, I would like to share that Shane Hankins, our executive director is moving on to another position at the end of August. We wish him the best with his new endeavors. I will be taking over temporary leadership duties, on a part time basis, while we search for new leadership. More information about this transition and our national search for new leadership is available on our website www.roadoflife.org.
Yours in service,

Rob Emrich
Founder, Road of Life | The Keren Emrich Foundation