This year’s Fair Trade Marketplace is online! Shop for your holiday gifts from the comfort of your home, and a percentage of all orders will support ECS. You’ll find thousands of unique items made by artisans around the world. Click here for shopping links and instructions for purchasing to ensure that a percentage of your order is donated to ECS PCO.

The Fair Trade Marketplace will be happening in a new and different way this year. Instead of an in-person event in the ECS school building, we’ll be asking supporters to purchase their fair trade gifts online through our vendors’ websites. In return, ECS will receive a percentage of the sales we send to these vendors so we can continue to raise critical funds for the school and support fair trade artisans around the world at the same time.

We will be announcing these opportunities now through December 2020, so keep an eye on this page!

Our first partnership is with an organization whose artisans quickly switched gears to making face masks during lockdown in India. ZuMantra is a Pittsburgh-based company working with artisan cooperatives in South Asia. They are offering 10% of all sales with this promo code: “CHARTER” to ECS. All profits from these masks will go back to the women artisans. In addition, they are also donating a mask for each mask bought to Pittsburgh non-profit 412 Food Rescue! To place an order, go to http://www.zumantra.org/masks and enter promo code “CHARTER” on the shopping cart page.

Every time we raise money through our community, we turn it right back around and invest it all across our three schools in ways big and small. We are pleased to share below our Mini-Grants awarded this year, Specialist Fund requests fulfilled, and some of the many things we have provided funding for.

Mini-Grants Awarded 2019-2020 Academic Year:

– Parent Resource Center (housed in Middle School)
– Battle of the Books (Middle School)
– Culturally Diverse Picture Books to Read and Share
– Spanish Class Resources (K-5)
– Tourniquets/Clotting gauze for Staff (all grades)
– Flexible Seating (4A)
– Children’s Grief Awareness Day (35 students in 3 schools)
– 6th Grade Literacy grant request
– 8th Grade Literacy grant request
– Kindergarten Grade Literacy grant request
– Stars of Hope (Middle School)
– Speed Stacking Cups (Middle School PE)
– GSSU Gender Sexuality Student Union
– Sustainable & Safe Edible School Yards
– Lower School Garden & Apple Tree Guild (1st & 2nd grade)
– Chess Club (23 first graders)
– New Calculators for 6th Grade Math
– ECS Ecostewards Rain Garden Rehab
– Middle School Project Fair (“Museum of Student Work”)
– Nature looms for all 3 campuses (access at recess)
– 3rd Grade Literacy – Mystery Series Books
– Lighting for All Occasions (school-wide events – Mr. R.)
– Shelves for PE (intermediate school)

Specialist Fund:

K-5 Music: Let the Creativity Begin!
K-5 Health/PE: Goals in Intermediate PE
K-5 ESY: Season Extension
K-5 Discovery: Discovery Block Imaginative Play
K-5 Thinking Lab: Supplies
K-5 Spanish: Bilingual Books
Athletics: Additional Basketball & Futsal Uniforms (Middle School ECS athletes)

Special gift to Middle School: Gaga Ball Pit

Publications:
– Directory Printing
– Calendar Printing
– K-5 Yearbook

Ongoing Funds:
– Garden Fund
– Health/Nurse Fund
– Helping Hands Fund
– Specialist Fund

In-Class Activities
– Classroom party kits
– Room parent funding (budget given for each classroom)

Academic Support
– Special Programming/Enrichment
– Teacher Book Fund expenses

ECS Staff
– Staff Appreciation Gifts
– Staff Coffee Supplies
– Staff snacks, treats and sweets

PCO Community Events
– Fall Festival
– New Families Welcome
– Scavenger Hunt
– School Summer Events
– Summer Play Dates
– Gingerbread House Decorating

School Events
– Field Days
– Middle School Social Events

PCO COVID-19 Relief Fund