The church-school partnership mistake I made for over a year . . . and how you can fix it in 5 minutes

Our first year with our school we were lazer focused getting people inside the school.  One of the school’s answers to our “how can we help” question was a need for mentors and reading buddies.  Over 50 of our people commit wanted to serve in the school as a reading or math buddy.  There was a lot of admin work to line up schedules andmake sure volunteers didn’t come in when a class was at gym or lunch.
And while we were lazer focused on getting people inside the school for these volunteer opportunities, we failed to see the elementary school day is a less than ideal time for people to get to a school when they have . . . jobs!  Additionally many schools can be hard to get to from places people work. 
So we unintentionally left out a whole group of people who wanted to participate in this new partnership, in this new service to our local community, but couldn’t because how we designed it. 
It was our fault.
That was a miss on our part.
Here’s how one fix helps you avoid this mistake.  When you partner with a school, create opportunities outside the school day:

• How can you provide opportunities during the summer?
• What administrative or church-side work (clothing drives, appreciation drives, making meals, etc) can people do outside of the school day?
• What affiliate programs can you work with to provide people evening opportunities to serve the school?  Bonus: here’s one program we partner with in service to our school

You can learn from my mistake.  From my short-sightedness.  When you partner with your school, you’ll go into it with how you can include all of your people and invite everyone to participate in some way and not leave someone out.