About the Shamrock Irish Charitable & Cultural Foundation
The Shamrock Irish Charitable & Cultural Foundation (SICCF) was created by the Kansas Ancient Order of Hibernians (KSAOH) as a separate 501c3 charity to support the charitable work of the KSAOH and to increase the increase the knowledge of and the contributions made to the community by the KSAOH. For more information about the KSAOH.
The Mission of the SICCF is:
To advocate and preserve the Irish Culture through charitable giving and
Actions that make a significant positive impact upon our communities.
The SICCF supports and partners with the KSAOH State Board and the individual KSAOH Divisions to support the charitable needs of the communities we live in which include many worthy causes where we can make a positive contribution to success.
Beyond the many smaller acts of charity that support our communities, the SICCF is focused on a signature cause where it can make a significant impact on a dire need in the community. That signature focus will be known as:
“Shamrocks for Learning”
There has been much written and reported about the loss of learning due to the COVID pandemic. Student test scores have not returned to pre-COVID years. All schools are desperately working to fix this decline.
Students most at risk are those with learning disabilities that force them to fall even further behind because of the lack of funds for special educators, paraprofessionals and learning materials. Since the early 1990s, autism has grown from 1 in 1000 to 1in 31 today. Some of that has been through better diagnosis and testing but it shows the greater need to help these students. One in five students experience language-based learning disabilities, with Dyslexia accounting for 80-90% of those learning challenges. Down Syndrome occurs in approximately 1 of 700 live births each year in the United States. There are other learning disabilities that students encounter besides the ones previously mentioned, including Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities (NVLD) and others that identify the challenges some students have in achieving academic success.
The SICCF signature focus is to help make a difference for the most at risk students in our communities. While schools are focused on getting the general population of students back to appropriate academic skill levels, there is a challenge to provide the necessary resources to help the students with the myriads of learning disabilities that could prevent them from achieving the academic success critically needed to be successful as an adult.
While the SICCF would like to help all students, it must start with a narrow focus at first to ensure having a successful impact. As the foundation grows, the scope can be broadened to help more students. Therefore, the original scope will be to focus on the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and the Wichita Diocese. The reasons being:
The public schools in the state currently have funds to deal with some of these disabilities, although additional resources would be very helpful
Catholic schools in the state have little or no resources to assist these students. The students either struggle to get by or they must supplement their education with help from other resources that may or may not be available elsewhere in the community
The four current KSAOH divisions are located in the two dioceses mentioned and that will be where the fundraising will be focused for now.
The goal in the future would be to expand to all four dioceses in the state and then possibly expand to support the needs of the public schools in the state.
The SICCF is not an expert in the educational area, but we are partnering with organizations that work closely with the individual schools to identify the specific needs and to provide the resources to satisfy those needs. The two organizations we have begun partnering with are:
EMBRACE (Enriching Many By Reaching All in Catholic Education) in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas
Holy Family Special Needs Foundation in the Wichita Diocese
Both organizations work with the individual schools to identify the resources needed and provide the funding to the schools to acquire those resources
The result of our efforts will be to help those at a learning disadvantage to be successful academically. Graduation rates are one way to ultimately measure our success, along with meaningful employment success. These would be lagging indicators that will make sure the resources provided are helping. As a beginning, we will measure our success by how many staff and resources our partners have been able to provide by our contributions raised and the total impact our partners are having. We will also work to track the number of students those resources have impacted. By starting with the leading indicators, we can begin to track the impact we can have on this critical need. Our goal will be to make sure no student gets left behind because there weren’t resources and help needed to ensure their success.
Our “Shamrocks for Learning” is the umbrella fundraising motto for our signature focus. There will be different activities, events and solicitations that will fund our efforts to help those students most at risk.
We hope you will join us in this quest and contribute by providing grants and/or sponsorships to the SICCF or for any of our fundraising events or individually making an on-line donation below.