Over the past year our Kids Unlimited campus has undergone one of the most transformative artistic murals in the region. The piece canvasing thousands of square feet and featuring geometric color patterns designed by nationally acclaimed artist Xavi Panneton.The newly moralized Kids Unlimited has received regional and national attention and featured in acclaimed architectural publications.

The mural has helped to not only share a unified vision for our campus but lift the presence of our neighborhood which has historically been recognized as our region’s most distressed neighborhood. With a combination of vibrant colors, shapes and imagery the mural celebrates diversity and lifts the awareness of our work in one of the most historically distressed neighborhoods in the Southern Oregon region.

Click on the arrows to scroll left or right in the gallery below, or click on an image to enlarge.

Just before the pandemic paralyzed our operations, we opened our Kimmel Family Resource Center. The building took over a year to remodel and is home to our first pre-school program, Pre KU. Dedicated to providing culturally responsive learning to students often deprived of early learning programs, the center features kinesthetic learning rooms, indoor playgrounds, outdoor gardens and multi-sensory classrooms dedicated to quality learning standards to help students transition into our KU Academy. The center also integrates a parental literacy center supported by the Meyer Memorial Trust providing a multitude of bi-lingual parent education support services to assist holistic family learning. In addition to literacy, education and wrap around services the center also houses empowerment printing our first entrepreneurial project for middle and high school students providing a full-service printing and embroidery company. 

While the opening of this center was incredibly uplifting, it’s unexpected closure was deflating. The energy to bring the building to fruition and it’s connectivity to completing a full campus dedicated to pre-school to college pipeline was a fulfillment of a dream to bridge a history of services together to create a universal system of care for our kids and families. And while the forced closure of the center certainly halted the newly launched services, the center transitioned quickly to an emergency services support center to meet the sudden needs of families unexpectedly impacted by Covid19. The new building became a hub for brokering technology and online education and basic need services for both English and non English speaking families while finding renewed purpose in the fall in hosting our emergency service pre-school.

With emerging population growth and pressing needs for student achievement, KU Academy opened a second campus in White City.

The school, a partnership with Eagle Point school district opened in the fall of 2020 with dedicated emergency childcare designed to support our first classes of kindergarten as well as a second site for our pre-school Pre KU.

In addition to the newly opened campus, the center has also provided thousands of fresh, daily cooked meals to vulnerable children and families of the upper Rogue communities.

When our students left the KUA campus on March 13, 2020, we never imagined that they wouldn’t return to the classrooms.  We immediately began planning how to support our students academic and socio-emotional needs.  This included determining the best platform to reach students for virtual instruction, ensuring that every student had a computer at home and reliable internet access, training our teachers how to use these new digital technologies, and communicating with parents all of the new changes that were occurring.  Simple things such as how to organize materials to send home and figuring out who needed internet and school supplies became part of our daily routine.

KUA developed the VIBE (Virtual Instruction Brining Equity) Comprehensive Distance Learning program, which includes live instruction via Zoom.  In the spring, we were one of the few schools to offer daily live instruction to our students - and to continue our music, art, PE, ELD (classes for English learners) and other electives classes virtually.  Our parents appreciated the variety of classes and daily interaction with teachers.  Our VIBE Advocacy Team checked in on students who weren’t logging in to classes, provided technical assistance, and delivered materials to their homes if needed.

Moreover, our small group instruction via breakout rooms, interventions with specialists to meet individual learning needs, high quality instruction, hands on virtual garden lessons, and teachers office hours for homework help set us apart from other schools.   

Finally, the VIBES advocacy team was implemented to assist students with socio-emotional supports and behavioral needs.  These efforts were designed to create support services for students who were struggling with any number of adversities experienced during the isolation struggles of covid19 in addition to those who experienced hardships with the Almeda fire.  Our ability to evolve and implement services to meet the individual needs of each of our students represented our commitment to the foundation of our work, a relationship.

When the devastating Almeda fire decimated the communities of Phoenix and Talent hundreds of homes were destroyed forever changing the landscape of that community. For 41 members of our Kids Unlimited community it meant, losing everything.   In the immediate wake of the fire, Kids Unlimited and our community of supporters began to mobilize campaigns to not only stabilize the immediate families connected to our organization but also leverage our support systems to assist hundreds of people impacted by the natural disaster.

• Clothing and Food Drive with Medford Rogue Rotary Club
• Rogue Valley Essentials and Food Drive: a massive fire relief effort providing thousands of clothing items, basic need toiletries and food items
• Emergency food access to families in Rogue Valley and Upper Rogue
• Emergency childcare
• Emergency lodging provisions
• Permanent housing for 14 individuals displaced with Kids Unlimited managed housing support

Since the onset of the pandemic, Kids Unlimited recognized that the transition to online learning was hardest on homes with limited English proficiency and those struggling with other barriers created by poverty. Beginning in September, Kids Unlimited provided nearly 350 students a day with on site childcare infused with pod learning to assist vulnerable learners who we recognized were most at risk of falling through the cracks. The emergency childcare provision ran 10 hours a day and was designed to provide small groups with tutoring to assist online learning, access to healthy food and nutrition and quality enrichment programs focusing on raising self esteem and confidence.

One of the most important programs of this past year has been our food distribution system. The food program became an essential service for thousands of meals to children who would otherwise face food insecurities because of the pandemic. Each day, freshly prepared and cooked from scratch meals were distributed in the thousands. As the pandemic’s toll increased those in isolation and those facing unemployment, the dependency on our food program grew daily. Since March, Kids Unlimited has provided hundreds of thousands of healthy meals to not only children enrolled in our programs but to children throughout some of the of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Southern Oregon including both Medford and White City. The meal distribution has grown to providing families with 7 days of offerings to ensure that during our communities most volatile time, no child would go hungry. To support families isolated without access to transportation, Kids Unlimited hundreds of hours delivering food daily ensuring access to all.

Click on a title below to see the great people who make the Unlimited possible: