Learning Life’s 2025 Volunteers of the Year

Learning Life relies on a lot of volunteers to grow, and here I want to recognize two of them because they are our 2025 Volunteers of the Year:

First, you may have heard of Cindy, because I periodically sing her praises, but also because this is the third year in a row that she’s one of our Volunteers of the Year.  Why?  Because for nearly three years she has shepherded Learning Life through an invaluable strategic planning process.  Because of Cindy’s initiative, thoughtfulness and patience, we have a, updated and far more fully developed Learning Life strategic plan including our mission, vision, values, origin statement, logic model, three-year program and overall goals, and more.  This year, Cindy also helped with embedding that strategic plan in our Board of Directors meetings, and on November 2, she kindly presented about her Canadian family via our international family diplomacy dialogues.

You likely haven’t heard of Jan Eakin because Jan is a new Learning Life volunteer this year.  Jan and I met via the Taproot Foundation, which connects nonprofits with free, skilled consultants.  Jan recently retired as a Salesforce Solutions Architect, and to Learning Life’s benefit, she has been willing to do considerable research and many meetings with different CRM (constituent/customer relationship management) providers to winnow down to the provider we’ve finally chosen: Neon One.  Neon One focuses on the needs of small to mid-size nonprofits, and will have big benefits for Learning Life including finally integrating all our data we’ve been collecting in separate Google Drive sheets, and being able to more systematically communicate with our program participants, donors and volunteers.

Thus, it’s fair to say that Cindy and Jan have both had course-setting impact on Learning Life.

For these reasons, a big THANK YOU and happy holidays to Cindy and Jan!

Founder & Director

Learning Life