“Connecting youth to the community through art.”

January 4, 2010

Dear Friends and Family:

We are a group of five high school students from Camden, Maine contacting you to ask for your support.

Two years ago we started an Art Club at Camden Hills Regional High School with the mission statement, “Connecting youth to the community through art.”

Last year we became aware of Safe Passage (www.safepasssage.org), a non-profit organization based in Yarmouth and working to help make the dream of education a reality for the children whose families live and work in the Guatemala City garbage dump.

We decided to collaborate with the local group “PenBay Friends of Safe Passage” to create the “PenBay Art Club”. We are working with the founder of PenBay Friends of Safe Passage, Karen Hansen, towards raising enough money to travel to Guatemala in April of 2010. We will be collaborating with girls our age who attend the Safe Passage program. Our project will be to jointly design and create a permanent mosaic installation for their main building.

One of our primary goals for this trip is to connect teens from our community to teens in the Safe Passage community through art. We also hope through our grass roots fundraising efforts to set an example and inspire more young people to organize service-learning trips, not only for Safe Passage but for many other such worthy causes.

Upon our return we will be sharing our experiences from this collaboration as a way of furthering our goal and thanking our supporters. We hope to build upon the vital connection between Maine and Safe Passage, initiated ten years ago by Hanley Denning, the visionary founder of the Safe Passage program and a Yarmouth native.

Any contribution to our cause will be greatly appreciated. Checks can be made payable to 'PenBay Friends of Safe Passage' and mailed to PenBay Art Club c/o PenBay Friends of Safe Passage at PO Box 153, Camden, Maine 04843.

Thank you so much for your gracious consideration of our request. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

PenBay Art Club

Madeline Owen

Emily Seymour

Sarah Streat

Mackenzie Gassett

Julia Kosowsky