CIS has a great time at Taste of Home Cooking School!

Once again, local cooks filled the auditorium at The Centre for Performing and Visual Arts of Coweta County to attend the annual fall Taste of Home Cooking School! Sponsored by Newnan Utilities, this year's cooking school, held on November 12, 2015, benefited Communities In Schools! Above are members of our own "Team CIS," consisting of Denise Buchanan, Executive Director Gina Weathersby, and Jessie Foreman.

Taste of Home is America’s #1 cooking school program, providing entertaining and relatable cooking instruction for audiences nationwide. Attendees received a gift bag filled with goodies from national and local sponsors, Taste of Home magazines, money saving coupons and much more. Taste of Home’s Culinary Specialist Michelle “Red” Roberts, a longtime favorite of the local audience, shared home cooking tips and tricks while demonstrating step-by-step recipes for the season’s best dishes. Above are Michelle and Joni Scarbrough of Newnan Utilities.

And here are Newnan Utilities General Manager Dennis McEntire and Denise Buchanan. Thank you to Newnan Utilities for sponsoring this great event, and thanks, too, to our local sponsors for the cooking school: CTCA, Infiniti of South Atlanta, Progressive Heating and Air, and Wells Fargo!

Taste of Home Cooking School tickets still available!

It's not too late to get your tickets to this Thursday's popular Taste of Home Cooking School being sponsored by Newnan Utilities at the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts. And remember, this year's event will benefit Communities In Schools!

Taste of Home is America’s #1 cooking school program, providing entertaining and relatable cooking instruction for audiences nationwide. Attendees receive a gift bag filled with goodies from national and local sponsors, Taste of Home magazines, money saving coupons and much more!

Taste of Home’s Culinary Specialist Michelle “Red” Roberts will be at the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts on Thursday, November 12, to share home cooking tips and tricks while demonstrating step-by-step recipes for the season’s best dishes.

Newnan Utilities and CIS are excited to announce Cooks Who Care as part of this season's cooking show. Cooks Who Care unites compassionate, real people across the country who give back through food and donations. Attendees who bring canned goods or school supplies will be entered to win a special door prize.

Tickets are $10.  Doors open at 5 p.m., and the show starts at 6:30. Tickets are available online at NewnanUtilities.org or at the following locations:  Newnan Utilities (Sewell Road and Bypass location), The Centre for Performing and Visual Arts, The Newnan Times-Herald, Bank of North Georgia (Thomas Crossroads only) and Ace Growlers in downtown Newnan.

CIS peer tutors help change lives!

Communities In Schools is the nation’s largest and most effective dropout prevention organization dedicated to keeping kids in school and helping them achieve in life. What sets CIS apart is our holistic approach to addressing both the academic and nonacademic needs of students.

Working with school staff, CIS site coordinators — who are positioned in schools — identify students in danger of dropping out, assess what they need, and then provide wraparound services through appropriate community partnerships. These services include food, clothing, transportation, housing, medical and dental care, mental health services, tutoring, mentoring and much more. 

Above are some of our CIS peer tutors and students hard at work at East Coweta High School, just one more way CIS of Coweta is helping change lives!

Mentoring plays vital role in helping young people succeed

Mentoring is a topic that often comes up in discussions of how to inspire young people to achieve in life. Last year, the national president of CIS, Dan Cardinali, wrote a column in which he talked about a groundbreaking new report, “The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring."

"For the first time ever,” Cardinali said, "researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of young adults, asking about the difference that mentors had made during their childhood years.”

The study’s findings? Young people with mentors in their lives:

• Set higher educational goals

• Are more likely to attend college

• Are more likely to participate in positive behaviors such as sports, extracurricular activities and volunteer opportunities

• Have higher levels of self-esteem and self-confidence

• Are more resilient when facing setbacks or challenges

"For anyone who works with kids, none of this comes as a major surprise,” Cardinali said. "We have decades' worth of literature showing the difference that mentors can make, but what's new here is the perspective of the young people themselves. Again and again in the pages of this report, we hear the voices of those who benefited from a mentoring relationship. They recognize the value of a mentor in their formative years. They know where they might have been without that relationship, and they almost always intend to 'pay it forward' by becoming mentors themselves."

Click here if you’d like to read “The Mentoring Effect” for yourself.