FA Intermediate’s First-Ever 3rd Grade Pen Pal Program with Glenmede Princeton a Success
From January to March of 2021, our first-ever 3rd Grade Pen Pal program at Foundation Academy Intermediate was launched, funded, and led by Glenmede Princeton, a leading investment and wealth management firm.
More than 50 volunteers from the Glenmede Princeton office exchanged 185 letters with 76 third grade students. Letters were exchanged virtually over email, with Ms. Tiffany Acevedo, 3rd Grade Teacher, serving as facilitator and intermediary. The letter-writing activity blended perfectly with the 3rd grade curriculum, allowing our scholars to practice corresponding and safely sharing ideas with a real person in our broader community.
“This project allowed our scholars to apply the new skills they were learning in real time and the letters gave our students something new and different to look forward to during a year when we’ve had to sacrifice so much,” said Kathleen Reilly Streicher, Executive Director of the Friends of Foundation Academies. “We are thankful to Glenmede for making this possible, to our volunteers for their time and talent, and to our staff and students at FA Intermediate for expertly navigating this new program in a virtual learning space.”
Glenmede Princeton’s letter writers were able to share their hobbies, goals, information about their careers, fun personal stories, and even photos of their pets with our scholars.
“It was a meaningful and fun way for Glenmede Princeton employees to help enrich the FA learning experience while getting to know the school community we are so proud to support,” says Bob Kiep, Director of Glenmede’s Princeton Regional Office and a member of the FA Leadership Council. “We’d be happy to repeat this program in future years.”
Our scholars enjoyed the experience, too. One scholar wrote, “I got to meet cool people! We got to talk to someone about what’s going on in the world and we can finally talk to someone about how we are doing. It was cool to write to a real person.”
We express our deepest gratitude to Glenmede Princeton for launching this initiative, and for their continued partnership and support.
About Glenmede
An independent and privately held investment and wealth management firm, Glenmede was founded in 1956 to serve in perpetuity as the investment manager and trustee of the Pew family’s charitable interests—The Pew Trusts. Today our trust company provides highly customized investment, fiduciary and advisory services to high-net-worth individuals and families, endowments, foundations and institutional entities, representing more than $40 billion of assets under management. Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the firm has offices in New York, New York; Morristown and Princeton, New Jersey; Palm Beach, Florida; Cleveland, Ohio; Washington, DC; and Wilmington, Delaware. Learn more at www.Glenmede.com
Michelle Lawlor, Marketing and Communications Associate, spearheads Foundation Academies’ marketing and communication efforts. Born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, Michelle holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism/Multimedia Communications from Rider University.