Clients and community partners are essential to the world of EAST, providing students with incredible opportunities to learn and grow. Nonprofit organizations, in particular, offer a wealth of problems to solve and experiences to gain. The Children’s Safety Center of Washington County is one such organization that has collaborated with EAST programs in Northwest Arkansas for more than a decade.

In recent years, projects with the Children’s Safety Center have ramped up, especially as the organization began moving into a new building. A key concern during this transition was preserving the history represented by hundreds of children’s handprints on the walls of the old building.

“When kids finish the difficult process of interviewing with us, they get to paint their hand in whatever color they like and leave their mark on our wall,” said Peyton Stewman, Marketing Strategist at the Children’s Safety Center of Washington County. “When we were preparing to move, we had to find a way to keep those handprints, as they are a powerful symbol of our mission.”

Stewman, an EAST alumna from Har-Ber High School, was tasked with preserving these meaningful handprints. To achieve this, she reached out to local EAST programs for assistance.

“With help from leadership at Springdale Public Schools, I connected with multiple programs to find solutions to our problem,” Stewman explained. “This led to two projects: Sonora Middle School created a virtual tour of the old building, while Springdale High School photographed each handprint and converted them into vector files.”

The virtual tour developed by Sonora Middle School included details about each room's purpose and featured stories of children who had passed through the center, highlighting their handprints. The vector files created by Springdale High School allowed the center to project the handprints onto the front of the new building at night.

“If I had tried to do all this work myself, it would have taken me two years,” Stewman said. “The students were incredibly mature and professional, even signing confidentiality agreements without any issues.”

After the move, the Children’s Safety Center expanded its collaboration with Helen Tyson Middle School, a partnership that has saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars.

“They developed a virtual tour of our new facility, which is three times larger than the original,” Stewman said. “The tour includes video attachments, compelling stories, and links to resources, helping children and their parents understand what to expect when they come to us.”

EAST students at Helen Tyson Middle School are also creating fidget toys for children visiting the center and designing stuffed animals modeled after the center’s therapy dog.

Stewman has enjoyed seeing the impact of EAST students on her organization and the growth in their skills, highlighting the mutually beneficial relationship between EAST programs and their clients.

“There was one middle school girl whose communication skills improved so much that we no longer needed to coordinate through her facilitator,” Stewman shared. “She took ownership of the project, and her team presented the virtual tour to our entire staff with such pride that it brought us to tears.”