Extreme Kids & Crew Launches Executive Director Search

Dear Extreme Kids & Crew community,

After 10 successful years, Extreme Kids & Crew’s founding Executive Director Caitlin Cassaro will be leaving the organization at the end of December. Caitlin’s leadership, vision, spirit, and tenacity have been a driving force in making Extreme Kids a “space to be,” where young neurodiverse people, their friends, and their families, socialize, create, and play. We are deeply proud and grateful for her accomplishments and wish her much success in her next endeavors.

As we bid Caitlin Cassaro farewell, the Board of Extreme Kids & Crew is excited to announce the launch of our search for Extreme Kids & Crew’s next Executive Director. This is an extraordinary opportunity to build on our past successes to take this small and essential organization to its next generation of sustainability and impact.

The Board has engaged Rachel Howard, a seasoned nonprofit leader and friend of Extreme Kids, to serve as Interim Executive Director. Steve Stern, an experienced nonprofit financial professional, will serve as the Interim Director of Finance and Administration. Rachel and Steve worked together at INCLUDEnyc for many years where Rachel served as Executive Director and Steve served as Director of Finance. Together with Extreme Kids & Crew’s dedicated staff and Board of Directors, they will work to ensure a smooth transition.

We are looking for a strategic thinker with expertise developing sustainable programs and partnerships to advance the organization’s mission of increasing access to play in New York for young neurodiverse people and their Crews. An exceptional candidate will embody the qualities and values that reflect Extreme Kids’ unique mission and values: creativity, connection, compassion, respect, and collaboration, and a desire to include the voices of the people and communities served in program development.

To learn more about this opportunity and for directions on how to apply, please visit the job posting on our website. And if you know someone who might be interested, please spread the word! We're excited for what this next chapter holds for our organization and can't wait to get started.

Christian Bergeron
Chair, Board of Directors

Highlights From The 2020 Extreme-A-Thon

Thanks to your wonderful support, we raised more than $12,000 in the Extreme-A-Thon! Check out a compilation of highlights from the past month as our community broke out of its shell and got creative to raise money for Extreme Kids & Crew.

Thanks to your wonderful support, we raised more than $12,000 in the Extreme-A-Thon! Check out some highlights from a month of our community at its most crea...

Board President Vanessa Connelly on Being A Woman Business Leader in 2020

From Authority Magazine:

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

My work as board chair at Extreme Kids and Crew has been very exciting and rewarding. We went from having one space in a public school to three sensory gyms in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, all in fairly short order. To go from these really physical spaces to a fully virtual footprint after the pandemic closures was a massive change. As an organization that creates community for disabled kids and their people, strategizing about how to most effectively reach out online and create programming and events that interested, served and expanded these connections at such an isolating time- that has been exciting. I am so impressed with our Executive Director Caitlin Cassaro and the whole staff for not only meeting the challenge but thriving in this new world.

Read the whole interview with Vanessa.