Grant Applicant: YFC Maine

The feature below is brought to you by YFC Maine, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

There is a lot of "ugly" in our community of Howland, Maine, and well, in our world, really.  Did you know our small city’s hospital is the leading hospital in the United States for delivering drug addicted babies? Or that over half of our town’s school population goes hungry for meals each and every day?

Did you know that on average our community’s prison holds a minimum of over 50 more inmates than it is designed to hold? Or that our EMT’s administer more Narcan (a heroin overdose reversal drug) on average more each day than previous years combined? There is a lot of "ugly" in our community. Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted, caught up, if you will, in all of the ugly.

But there is beautiful...

A whole lot of beautiful...

Our aim is to help bring light to that beautiful. Rather than getting lost in the statistics and all of the ugly, we hope to walk  through the ugly and fix our eyes to the beautiful.
My husband and I spent five years working for a local high school. A baby brought about a job change and we found ourselves running a restaurant in our community. We began to see life from both sides, first our students’ and then what these students were aspiring to do after high school. This dishearteningly opened our eyes to the drug epidemic’s full force. It knows no bounds or social status. Young lives are being ripped apart in an ever increasing force. On more than one occasion, I cried with our community members as they chose to spend their last dollars to feed their drug addiction, instead of their children. It’s not just a statistic to say over half of our students are going hungry everyday. It’s real lives, real children, right here.

It was through having our eyes really opened to all of the ugly around us, that we knew we needed to strive to create beauty in the midst. Through law enforcement friends and area organizations, we began to see the generational issues that were at hand. It wasn't just young people, but young and old alike. A sheriff patrolling our town once told me that in the same day he had arrested a grandmother, father, and son all in the same family, for separate crimes. That's when we began to think, “What if we created an avenue were we could reach students before they became a statistic? What if every student we came into contact with knew they were loved, pursued (we were around for the long haul), and that they were beautiful?”

We teamed up with YfC a nationally recognized after school program, to create an avenue, an escape for students in need. Our aim is to be there, to place caring adults into the lives of students for genuine relationships, no strings attached - just purely loving on the hurt and broken (and who isn't hurt and broken?) helping them see the beauty in their own lives.
We do this through Campus Life nights, which are high energy, everyone come-as-you-are evenings. Where we create a family-like atmosphere, we discuss things like making the right choices and how to navigate hurdles life undoubtedly throws at us. We also hold regular events which are just different ways we have fun with each other! Most recently we teamed up with our local high school to provide much needed meals for our students. While the school works tremendously hard to see that no student goes hungry during the school year, they are left with a loss over the summer months. That's where we were able to step in and continue their food program all summer long ensuring that no child goes hungry in our community.

We recently applied for a grant through an amazing organization called See Beautiful.
If chosen, this grant will help further our program, help us finalize our building, replenish our food supply, and ensure that our program continues to run.  See Beautiful's mission is to help create more beautiful in the world, and they do just that through a tremendous history of giving to nonprofits. You may also purchase clothing, jewelry and more from their site to help them continue their beautiful work.

I wanted to paint a picture of our community, how our students are living, what it is like day-to-day to be a student in the Howland area. Although it may seem like the odds are stacked against these students, they are beginning to see the beauty in our community around them, and they are beginning to learn that they have people in their corner.
A small town carpenter has donated countless hours to help us prepare our building for the upcoming food program, because he sees beautiful in these kids...

The town unanimously voted to sell us the building at a ridiculously low price, even when they could get more, simply because they see beautiful in what we are doing together...
A family of 8 living in one small trailer handed me what could possibly have been their last $10 bill to further help those students who are hungry. We see beautiful in their sacrifice.
A man whose name I don’t even know backed his truck up to mine and said, “The back end is full of food. Get it to families that need it.” He left without another word, because his thanks was in seeing the beautiful of giving.

​We are seeing beautiful.

Written by Kayla Thompson for YFC Maine

Edited by Jannan Poppen for See Beautiful