Jen – Volunteer Spotlight

Jen, mother of Erin and Owen, has been involved with GiGi’s Playhouse Twin Cities for the past three and a half years. Jen first began by participating in programs like Kids Club alongside her children, Erin and Owen, and quickly jumped in to be one of our fantastic volunteer leaders. Jen also encouraged her son, Owen, to get involved as a volunteer for GiGi’s. Jen has helped to co-lead both Kids Club and Teen Tastic in St. Louis Park, as well as provide information and become a resource to both of our satellites South Metro and Hudson – as they were starting up Teen Tastic in South Metro and Kids Club in Hudson. She embraced her leadership role with dedication and thoughtfulness every single month – carefully planning out every detail and leading with enthusiasm and positivity.

The moment our playhouse physically closed, one of our priorities locally was to navigate through figuring out how best to offer some local virtual programming for our community, including Teen Tastic every other week in April and May. Jen immediately jumped at the opportunity to lead – by being brave and courageous, as the very first leader for a local virtual program ever being offered through GiGi’s Playhouse Twin Cities, while blazing the new path for how we can begin to think through and plan virtual programming for our entire local community. She practiced in advance of Teen Tastic programming to get more comfortable with the GoTo Meeting app. Jen is always looking at how we can keep improving. She also got Owen involved with creating a video, “Making Oobleck (Magic Mud) Stress Balls”, to help our community. Her creativity and open mind helped encourage others that this approach to our programming will help our entire community at this time – and that it is worth it to give it a try. Now, week by week, more and more volunteers are stepping up to answer the call for our needed additional volunteers to lead up more and more local virtual programming – as we expand across age groups and topics.

Jen has also been an active leader on the grant writing committee, which has helped us to get more grants written than previous years. We really have appreciated her leadership and time with working on these endeavors too which also help our playhouse tremendously.

If you are one of our past volunteers, that have helped us out in our physical spaces at any of our Twin Cities playhouses – St. Louis Park, South Metro, and Hudson, WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW virtually! Please reach out to us to help at: volunteertwincities@gigisplayhouse.org

If you have never volunteered before, and are interested in getting involved with this movement, please take the first step by signing up here: https://gigisplayhouse.org/twincities/volunteer-form?paramname=a0q50000005qQdUAAU&tfa_2793=Twin+Cities and Santi Bromley, Program Manager, will reach back out to you about the next steps for you to get involved.

Thank you Jen, for being such an inspiring leader for our community, and for all of your great contributions! We are honored that you and your family are part of GiGi’s Playhouse Twin Cities.

To find Owen’s video, go here to our YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlbonbEGpig&t=9s