I don’t mean to be a pest but….

I am interrupting my normal flow here to get personal about a cause near and dear to my heart. If you follow me on social media, I am sure you are tired of me talking about this but I will always use my loud voice to speak for those whose voices cannot be heard.

When I am not dreaming of writing a best seller, my day job is chief executive/executive director/wearer of many hats of a small non-profit in southern Maine. My agency serves at risk, low income youth by providing safe, year round, out of school time programming to youth 7-17. We have grown rapidly in recent years, last year we served almost 600 individuals. Unfortunately the people who use our services cannot afford to pay for them so we rely on the generosity of the haves to help the have-nots along with my awesome grant writing skills.

After several great years of grant funding, things have gotten shaky. Shaky enough that we are tightening our already tight belt, trimming program days and all other sorts of not so fun things that do have an impact. However as we are in the middle of a grant cycle and on month four of running on our reserve funds, it became clear that I needed to do something…fast. So I decided to launch a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo. As you will see our goal is modest but with 30 hours or so left, time is running out and we really need to make our goal otherwise…I am looking at making some really hard choices that while annoying to me personally will be devastating for the youth that we serve.

So against my better judgment, I am bringing the cause to the blog in hopes that if enough people can help, it will make a difference in the lives of the kids that my agency serves.