Sponsoring Boise-Eliot Humboldt Elementary’s End of Reading Month Celebration for a 5th Year
March is National Reading Month, and we’re thrilled to share the amazing success story of our partnership with Boise-Eliot Humboldt Elementary School. For the past few years, ACMS Northwest has proudly sponsored the school’s March Madness Reading Challenge, an initiative aimed at celebrating the power of reading and supporting local education. In 2024, we were honored to witness an incredible 58% increase in student participation compared to the previous year, with approximately 40,000 additional minutes logged!
These remarkable numbers reflect the dedication of both students and educators to embrace the joy of reading, and we’re humbled to have played a part in this journey in partnership to Turner & Townsend Heery. With overall student participation soaring from 47.5% to 78.4%, we’re more inspired than ever to continue championing literacy and education in our community.
Friends of Trees Volunteering 2024
ACMS Northwest is proud to support the Friends of Trees organization annually. This year, ACMS Northwest sponsored the March 9th Gateway Green Tree Planting volunteer event.
Engineering For Kids 2024
ACMS Northwest is proud to support local schools continuously throughout the years and furthering STEM education within our community through programs we have created, such as Engineering for Kids. Our team hosted two sessions at different schools to educate these young children on transportation, safety, traffic control, construction management and inspection, and more to engage and spark interest in the fascinating A/E/C world. Over 35 kids were able to design and act out their own transportation mode, from drawing runways and landing in planes to the road to school, zooming around in a Hot Wheels car. ACMS Northwest is committed to inspiring and fostering education within our local community to do our part for the next generation of engineers.
PCC Civil and Construction Engineering Technology Guest Lecture
Wednesday, November 8th, 2023, ACMS Northwest guest lectured for Professor Redlinger’s Civil Engineering Construction Overview course at Portland Community College, Sylvania campus. Our CEO Laurie Allen, President Monique Allen, Operations Manager Karla Keller, and Construction Manager Kate Vaughn all shared various projects they’ve worked on for ACMS Northwest spanning across all of the types of projects PCC shares student could go on to work with. From I-205 Abernethy Bridge for transportation to the Secondary Treatment Expansion Program for wastewater treatment plants, we got to share some of the amazing projects that ACMS Northwest is working on currently. Adding depth and understanding to their curriculum through the progression of a real-life project and various situations that can occur in the industry.
2022: Boise-Eliot Humboldt Elementary School Book Bank Event
ACMS Northwest was honored to once again host the Children’s Book Bank reading event at Boise-Eliot Humboldt Elementary School in NE Portland. For this year’s event, the students nearly doubled their collective reading minutes from last year, to 106,000 minutes for the month of March 2022! We were able to have children’s author, N.D. Byma, come to the school and read his most recent book to the students via Zoom. Mr. Byma also donated a copy of each of his published books to the school library!
Additionally, the students were given the opportunity to participate in a writing contest where the winners’ submissions, one from each grade, were put together and printed in an anthology book, of which the entire student body received a copy. The classes with the most reading minutes received an ice cream party, provided by ACMS. The entirety of the school received goody bags from ACMS for participating which werefilled with sidewalk chalk, bubbles, funny face pens and bookmarks. During the ice cream party, we also raffled off a fewgiant Rice Krispy treats. This was a successful event that ACMS Northwest looks forward to hosting and expanding yearly.
Engineering For Kids: 2022 EFK School Visit
Engineering for Kids is a Portland area Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education program designed to encourage critical thinking in students early on, increases science and literacy, and enables the next generation of innovators. In 2022, ACMS staff was able to visit one of the local Engineering for Kids summer camps and introduce real life applications to the children on how an idea becomes a real structure through engineering.
The participants were able to see women and people of color in every position from Engineer to Project Manager. The children, ages 6-11, were divided into groups and provided various supplies to build a bridge to move the ping pong ball from one side of the table, to the other, without using their hands. They all rose to the challenge, drafting their designs, then constructing the structure with a little help from ACMS team members. We made the students honorary team members and focused on the importance of safety by adorning them in hard hats and safety vests. We look forward to partnering with Engineering for Kids again and working with these amazing children!
Children’s Book Bank Reading Event
ACMS partnered with the Children’s Book Bank in March 2021 to sponsor a reading event featured at Boise-Eliott/Humboldt Elementary in Portland. The Children’s Book Bank is an organization whose goal is to get books into the hands of children who might not otherwise have books of their own at home. In this event, the students collectively read over 56,000 minutes in the month of March. We were able to have the young author, Imani Ariana Grant, speak to the students of Boise-Eliott about her published children’s books and give encouragement to the students to be proud of their accomplishments and always dream big. For this event. ACMS donated 350 customer face masks for students and staff, as well as Domino’s Pizza vouchers for the winning classrooms.
Friends of Trees
At ACMS, we love to volunteer in our community. Friends of Tree’s is an organization that both helps the environment and brings people together through the act of planting trees in Portland Neighborhoods and natural areas. Since Friends of Trees was founded in 1989, they have collectively planted more than 870,000 trees and native plants with the help of thousands of volunteers in over 120 neighborhoods, in six counties, and two states. Due to COVID-19, we were unable to participate in an in-person event, our team chose to sponsor Friends of Trees for the Martin Luther King Jr. tree planting event.
Earth Day 2021
ACMS partnered with SOLVE Oregon for Earth Day 2021. Founded in 1969, SOLVE restores and preserves Oregon’s environment by mobilizing the power of volunteers and partners with the generosity of donors. Earth Day is an annual event on April 22nd to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EarthDay.org, including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries. Earth Day is important to ACMS as we take pride in caring about our community, helping it thrive and promoting sustainability. This year our staff volunteered by getting out and helping with organized clean up areas in Beaverton and Hillsboro.
