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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE    

(Columbus, OH) — Bridgeway Academy, a nonprofit education serving children with autism and developmental disabilities, was announced as one of 25 semifinalists to receive the Yass Prize presented by the Yass Foundation for Education after several rounds of rigorous judging.

Presented by the Yass Foundation for Education, the Yass Prize advances on four core principles: Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless education, collectively abbreviated as STOP. Each year, they reward dozens of organizations, building a growing network of innovative providers that demonstrate these qualities in their commitment to new ideas, technologies, and approaches to learning that bring education into the 21st century.

As semifinalists for the prize, Bridgeway Academy will receive $200,000 in funds to further their mission to inspire the potential and celebrate the ability of every child. Bridgeway Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, Erin Nealy and Abby David, will travel to New York on Wednesday, Sept. 11, where they will attend a summit hosted by the Yass Foundation to meet the other semifinalists from various organizations across the nation. In October, they will deliver a pitch in Miami, Florida in the hopes of winning the $1M prize. The winner of the Yass Prize will be announced on November 7. 

“We are so excited to be semifinalists for the Yass Prize, and are grateful for this incredible opportunity. We appreciate the increasing awareness and national recognition of what we’ve built here since our founding 20 years ago,” says David.

For 20 years, Bridgeway Academy and Therapy Center has been committed to offering an education and therapeutic model that transforms the way students and clients with autism and other developmental disabilities are served. Earlier this year, Nealy and David were also recognized as winners of the SMART 50 awards presented by the SMART Business network, which also celebrates their innovative model and impact on the community.

“We have so much to be thankful for, being announced as one of the semifinalists. We work tirelessly to make sure our students and clients thrive, and are deeply honored that our efforts are being recognized at this level,” said Nealy.

About the Yass Foundation

For more than 25 years, the Yass’ have dedicated their time, their intellect and their resources to creating excellent schools for parents to have meaningful choices. But when the Covid crisis revealed and magnified the vast inequities that surround a majority of our students, they pivoted to a more impactful way to spend their resources to speed up the pace of improving student lives. Thus it was that Janine’s passion for education opportunity for all students sparked the creation of the Yass Prize and the STOP Awards Initiative. Moving from reform to transform, Janine’s vision is fueling a new renaissance in education, based on the premise that every parent deserves the ability to provide their students with individualized, 21st century education opportunities offered in supportive environments alongside their peers. 

Hi everyone!

I began the week by continuing to work on our annual report. I’m happy with the progress that I’ve made with the design, which I have pictured below. I think it does a nice job of reinforcing the brand colors and overall goals. I kept most of the report in the Bridgeway navy blue since that is the “umbrella” color of the organization. The additions of orange and green act as accent colors to the report. The orange color symbolizes the Academy, and the green symbolizes the Therapy Center. I hope that adding these colors communicates that these programs are equal parts of Bridgeway and that it helps people to primarily recognize Bridgeway by the blue color rather than the orange color that was used before the rebrand.

Here are a few pictures of what it is looking like so far!

I also finished up the final posts to showcase Bridgeway’s Summer Program. I posted pictures from Spirit Week and made a recap reel of the moments I captured throughout the week. I also helped Rachel put together the giant portrait collage that students worked on during Art Week of the Summer Program. It felt like a full-circle moment, and I cannot believe that the summer went by so quickly. I can’t wait to see the collage displayed in the gymnatorium because I know that staff, visitors, and students will be so excited to see it too.

I finally worked on editing photos that I took during various events and prepped them to be posted in the following weeks. I was excited to hear from Alyssa that people have been appreciating the posts that I have been working on throughout the summer. The Advancement team does an amazing job of fundraising for different programs at Bridgeway, but that means that there is often not enough time to go out and experience and create more content around those programs to share on social media. She told me that it was a huge help to have me there to share the stories and programming at Bridgeway because many of the amazing moments can go unseen. It felt nice to hear because sometimes I can be overly critical of my work, but it makes me happy knowing that it is appreciated by my team and is doing something to benefit the organization.

This week is the last week of summer programming at Bridgeway. I helped take pictures of the students painting rocks that they can give to their friends, staff, and families. We also had another visit from a therapy dog, which I helped to take photos of too. This week was officially the last week of the Summer Program, and I will really miss helping Rachel carry it out. I will miss working closely with her in general. I was able to see how much she cares about the students and I felt like I learned how to better interact and engage with the students through her.

Here are some photos that I took during this week’s summer programming!

We also planned for the upcoming 20th anniversary. To celebrate 20 years of the organization, the team wanted to undergo a social media campaign through a series of short videos, highlighting different moments and people that are representative of Bridgeway’s goals and values. The campaign would start next month in August 2024 and end in December 2025. I had the idea that these videos should have voiceovers from our CEOs to make them feel more personable to viewers. I felt that voiceovers from the CEOs themselves would add a human element to the videos. We continued to build on the idea and decided that we could do voiceovers from the different subjects of the videos so that viewers could hear from the people of the stories themselves.

However, Janelle said that she wants us to think of a commonality in each video that ties them together. One thing that really stood out to me is when our Communications and Events Assistant, Alyssa, said that the videos should serve the purpose of showing the growth of Bridgeway and how this growth would not be possible without the support from grants and donors. I feel like this helps me understand the goal of the videos, and I’ll be keeping this in mind as we keep thinking of an effective way to tie the videos together.

I was also able to attend the Kiwanis Charity Regatta boat racing event. It’s an event where the nonprofits participating can table and race each other to win more money for their organization. It was lighthearted, and I felt that it was a good way to end the week.

This week, I began working on Bridgeway’s annual report for the 2023-2024 fiscal year and I started by mapping out the content that I wanted to incorporate into the report.

I decided to dedicate a two-page staff profile that highlighted our Crisis Stabilization Program manager and the program itself. I want this portion to feature a major success story that the program made possible with a student who was experiencing high levels of detrimental behavior that included self-harm. They are now able to live more independently and attend classes at Bridgeway with fewer behaviors. I also left the room to include pages that would highlight our Giving Tuesday campaign which raised over $18,000 for our Bridgeway Academy Market (B.A.M). The market is located on the lower level of our building and is a space where staff and students can come for food and snacks. The program is run by students and allows them to practice occupational skills by working at the cash register and preparing the food. Unfortunately, our Food Service Manager stepped down from their position, and the Market has not been open during the summer season. However, I have set up a meeting with Emily Walker, a transition specialist for Bridgeway Academy’s Applied Program, who has been acting as an interim supervisor for B.A.M. to ask for updates about the program and its plans for the future. Bridgeway’s segment on Viewpoint with Dennis Quaid was also another spotlight from the previous year that I plan to include in the report. The Viewpoint production team reached out to Bridgeway to film a segment raising awareness for the organization. I thought this was an amazing story because it also raises awareness for students and adults living with developmental disabilities as well. I want to feature this experience and include the finished segment in the report with a QR code. Lastly, I wanted to highlight other unique programs at Bridgeway such as the Young Men’s Club led by one of our speech therapists, Henry Newberg, whom I have featured in another previous blog post. I’ve also made room to showcase our Bridgeway theatre group which is led by another speech therapist, Alexa Reck. Though I don’t know much about the program, I have reached out to her to hopefully get more insight into what it is and the positive impact it has on our students.

I’m still brainstorming the design of the report as well as how I want to write about the programs. I feel that I am hitting a writing block, but I know that I want to include as much human interest as possible and I hope my writing will showcase that throughout the report.

I am also in the process of finishing up our Charity Regatta social campaign. Though the campaign did not generate as much money as I hoped, I’m still happy about the engagement we got from viewers on our social media platforms. I’m also happy we were able to highlight places, programs, and teams at Bridgeway that we have not highlighted before.

Bridgeway’s Summer Program is also coming to an end which is so bittersweet because being able to interact with the kids has become one of my favorite parts of the week. We wrapped up Community Week where students were able to decorate the front of the building with sidewalk chalk art. We had guest visits from the Columbus Fire Department and it was so fun watching the students interact with the firefighters. I was also able to take pictures of the visit and loved how the photos came out. I will include a couple down below!

This week, I continued to work on the charity regatta social campaign. The idea around the campaign was for our boat to make its way around Bridgeway, but viewers needed to guess the boat’s location. Every week, a riddle will be posted to our social media that hints at the location of the ship. Viewers would need to guess the riddle to figure out the location of the boat. For each person with a correct guess, that person will receive a ticket for a raffle prize. This week’s riddle hinted to people that the boat is with our Bridgeway facilities team! This leads to us getting more engagement on social channels due to more people commenting to guess the location. However, our amount of donations has been stagnant so I am hoping that it leads to more people donating later during the month.

I also wrote a riddle for the following week! See if you can guess the location of the boat!

“What is the place where students stay

When school is done for the day?

Full of games, it’s an island of fun

’Til their parents come to fetch them, one by one”

I also continued to work on my photojournalism project. So far, I have been shadowing the Crisis Stabilization team. I was able to follow a couple of team members during some of their sessions. My favorite session was aimed at reinforcing the behavior of stopping when someone yells “Stop.” Some students experience the behavior of running to places where they are not supposed to go. During this session, staff ran along with a student within the school and practiced stopping with the student when one of the staff said “Stop.” I ran along with them and was able to take photos during the session. Though it was challenging, I felt like the staff made the lesson fun for everyone involved. It was one of the most unique moments I had during my time at Bridgeway, and I also had a blast going along with this team. As I was taking pictures, however, I realized that the pictures were not able to incorporate the dialogues that are just as important as the imagery. So, I am going to try to include sounds from the moments that I capture in the project as well so that viewers can both see and hear the bonds that staff have with their students.

Below are some photos that I have taken from the session so far.