2024 Community Impact Award Goes To...
We are excited to announce that Molly Day, a long-time collaboration partner with SVP Portland, is the 2024 Sarah Cohen-Doherty Community Impact Award recipient! This award recognizes someone within the SVP Portland community who epitomizes the characteristics that enabled our former staff member Sarah to have such a positive impact at SVP. Molly exemplifies a genuine care for others, a focus on developing meaningful relationships, a personal commitment to equity, and is a changemaker in the community who works to ensure that all children thrive.
When Molly established the early learning hub in Multnomah County in 2014, she shifted the decision-making of the state-funded initiative to center the voices of parent leaders from Native American, Black, Somali, Latino, Vietnamese, and Slavic communities. In 2016, together in partnership with SVP, they created a vision for universal preschool and built a coalition to take this vision to the voters. Preschool For All passed in 2020 and is transforming the county’s early childhood system, with parent voice at the core, in large part due to Molly’s commitment to community-based participatory policy making.
When asked about her time working with SVP, Molly reflected: “Over the past dozen years I've watched SVP lean into their unique role in our non-profit landscape. SVP Partners and staff have learned how to listen to community partners and how to center social justice work. They check their own baggage at the door and that makes them such strong allies and supporters. I spent hours and hours with SVP folks in the years that we worked together on Preschool For All. SVP was the colleague you always hoped to find: someone smart and agile, ready to laugh while trying something new, always looking for how to do it better and never taking their eyes off the prize.”
Lauren Johnson, SVP Executive Director, remarked on Molly’s influence: “For decades, Molly has been an exceptional partner to SVP Portland and an exemplary champion for early childhood, working to build an early learning system in Multnomah County that is free from bias and gives every child what they need to learn and grow. Through her leadership of our local Early Learning Hub, she led transformational systems change work that centered on the needs of children and families most impacted by systemic disparities.Additionally, she and Sarah were terrific partners in our early work to envision, authentically involve family voice, and build towards a community-centered Preschool for All initiative. We’re very fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with Molly for many years now!”
Thank you to all who attended the 2024 Summer Social, where we celebrated coming together to honor Sarah’s memory and Molly’s tremendous leadership.
Please consider a contribution to the The Sarah Cohen-Doherty Memorial Fund, dedicated to SVP Portland’s goal that all children have access to high-quality, culturally-relevant early learning experiences. We cannot think of a better way to celebrate Sarah’s life than continuing the work to which she was so committed.
