Sittercity employees Brandon Worth and Noreen Stegemann volunteer weekly at Schiller Elementary through Open Books. Recently, the 5th grade kids had a special request for Open Books – they wanted a garden at their school.

Here are some photos:

Sittercity employee Noreen Stegemann gardening

The garden

Schiller Elementary

We had a great time at the Sittercity.com and Big Brothers Big Sisters Bowl for Kids’ Sake and raised $5,000. Here are some photos from the event:

To help further the mission of helping children reach their potential by pairing them with mentors, we here at Sittercity are opening our hearts and wallets with our first Big Brother Big Sisters Bowl for Kids Sake event — and we’d LOVE to see you there too.
WHO: All family, friends and acquaintances regardless of bowling skill
WHAT: Bowl for Kids Sake, with complimentary food, drinks and, of course, bowling
WHEN: Saturday, May 17 from 12-2pm
WHERE: Diversey River Bowl (2211 W. Diversey)
To start your own bowling team, join an existing team or sponsor any of us in our efforts to give back to the community, please visit our Bowl for Kids Sake website at http://sittercity.kintera.org.
Thanks for your continued loyalty and support, and we hope to see you in your bowling shoes!
The Sittercity Team

Sittercity employee Melissa Underwood volunteers monthly at Cornerstone Community Outreach (CCO). CCO is a non-profit organization created to raise the quality of life for low-income people. Their mission includes feeding and sheltering the homeless.

Melissa serves two lunches on the days when she volunteers. First, she serves lunch to the residents who are women, children and a few families. Then she serves lunch to area homeless people.

Melissa enjoys helping out in the community and interacting with the individuals that CCO serves.

Noreen playing word scramble with her reading buddy at Schiller Elementary

Genevieve, Dan, Erin and Ebony lent a hand and helped Open Books move over 100,000 books from storage units into a warehouse across town. It was an unbelievable day and an incredible achievement.

When Sittercity CEO Genevieve Thiers and COO Dan Ratner got married last October, they asked their guests to make charitable contributions to Open Books. They raised over $6,000. Open Books decided to spend the money on a new computer lab for the partner program Blue Gargoyle. The donation is fitting since Dan and Genevieve not only run an online care website, but met online as well.

Courtney Oliver of Olympia, WA may only be 10 years old, but she already has completed the necessary coursework to become a veterinary assistant. Courtney appeared on on February 6, 2008 to talk about her job as a veterinary assistant. Sittercity.com surprised Courtney with a $10,000 college scholarship. Courtney hopes to become a Veterinarian when she is old enough.

As a babysitter by nature (I’ve been sitting since the age of 8 and have clocked more than 2500 babysitting jobs in my life!) I have found that whenever I am working with kids, I naturally want to mentor them and help them to their highest potential. After I started Sittercity, I found that it left me with very little time to babysit, which is what I loved. That’s where Big Brothers Big Sisters stepped in and helped me to continue mentoring, even if I had no time to babysit! If you don’t know about Big Brothers Big Sisters, you should.

When I joined the BBBS program in Chicago last year, in January of 2007, I was immediately matched with Erin, my little. Let me tell you a little bit about her. She’s a really smart (and funny) 11-year-old who wants to be a doctor and lives in inner-city Chicago. She has an older sister named Ebony, a great grandmother, a huge appetite for reading, and is a quick learner. We immediately hit it off and have had outings every month ever since, to places all over Chicago. The BBBS program is also great—they provide support, activity ideas and constant emails to check in and see how it’s going. Around the middle of the year, Dan (my husband) and Erin’s sister Ebony started coming along, and we’ve been having a blast the whole time.

Here’s some of the highlights of the past year during my BBBS outings with Erin, my little sister.

Ice skating with Santa in Grant Park in Chicago

Visiting Cloudscape and the sculptures in Grant Park

Boating with Erin on Lake Michigan

At the Field Museum!

To the Aquarium

The Mexican Cultural Center (with Erin and Ebony, her sister)

On an authentic food tour

Singing at the Opera House!

And this is just the beginning—we’ve been also to the movies, to shows, to volunteer events and on educational tours…it’s been a blast. I highly recommend the Big Brothers Big Sisters program to anyone that missed babysitting and loves to be a mentor to younger kids. You can find more information about the program at: bbbs.org.

If you can’t babysit, it’s just as fun and rewarding! Cheers and enjoy.

Brad, VP of Operations at Sittercity helped out at Robinson Elementary with the students’ Biology unit. The class was studying animal adaptations. Brad brought in Leopard Geckos, an Eastern Milk Snake and a Tangerine Honduran Milk Snake to demonstrate how adaptations allow animals to survive in the wild.

The students were fascinated with the geckos and snakes.

Brad spoke about how an incubator is used to keep eggs warm.

Lots of happy faces in the classroom.

The students were amazed.

Two students observe Anne and Sammy, the Leopard Geckos.

It was a fun day full of learning!