can't thanks for joining us well thank you for having us and to start with i guess i'd like to know what is our community care scam well our community cares is a summer food program and a summer day camp for children from richmond huntington and bolton as you see here we service children from the age of about five to eleven and the some were very excited because we're starting a new summer camp for older children for twelve and thirteen year olds called the  community cares camp leadership adventure camp or o c c c so a lot of people see o c c see on the front porch for him or someplace else and that's just the abbreviation for our community cares camp and it's a wonderful summer day camp for four weeks every july children from richmond honey to bolton come together at camel's hump school and just have a really really great time it's really is magical to see these children tom we have wonderful counselors who who just love the children the children feel loved and cared for and valued and as a result they behave well and they they just get to exercise their creative juices we have no electronics no television none of that they just come and they use their imaginations and they sing and they dance and they play outdoors and they play with lego's and they create wonderful crafts and just everybody has a good time and  many children are involved in this camp every year and how does it work well the schools recommend children to come to camp because number one we don't want to attract children to the camp that should be in summer school so if they should be in summer school they should be the should go to summer school and but we do feed the children that come to summer school they will get two meals a day from us and as we know children who are fed well will learn better so we're thinking that we're offering a good service to the school district by feeding their children well the schools recommend children we generally have about fifty five to sixty a day and we have many many counsellors so we have a very good camper to counselor ratio so these are children that are not supposed to be in summer school these are children who might not get to go to a camp otherwise and the schools really know their children very well they know who would benefit from a creative camp sometimes kids need socialization they need practice working in groups or they just need time to spread their wings and and just really have a good time and be kids kids aren't kids don't have the opportunity to be kids anymore so we like to offer that just from the pictures i mean you can see that the kids not only eat well i mean a very well case a few words about the nourishment and the kind of things and where it comes from that the kids are eating all summer long we have been so lucky in the last four years that carole can't who's the exceptional cook at which male mentary school was our nutrition magician we called our nutrition edition she worked with real foods and whole foods we got foods last year we had a very generous grant from green mountain coffee roasters to buy food from local farms so we had a lot of fresh vegetables we had even meat we had fresh milk all things eggs chickens everything from local farms she would provide the children with many many choices every day so there would be an entree whether it's a sandwich or or tacos or or wraps or something but then they'd have like a seventeen item salad bar to choose from so they could practice making choices and trying new things one of the great favorites last year with kale chips we had a local for a local backyard gardener would bring us big bags of kale every week and carol and her staff would make them into kale chips and they would just disappear at lunch time and you know nobody could believe it that the kids were choosing vegetables because you had vegetables that they like you had fruits that they like and they had choices it wasn't just one so we've been very lucky to offer them this and hopefully to expand their their repertoire we also were able to offer the learning kitchen to some of the older children last year and that's a wonderful program by hunger free  whereby the children get a cooking lesson and they get to make food right at camp and then we give them a bag of food take home and they can cook for their families so it's a really valuable life skill they don't always get enough  school and it's very empowering when you can make your own food so the children really really love them and i know they can't makes a lot of connections because it also offers jobs to young adults in the area oh yes we our budgets are kept very low because the very nice people who live in richmond huntington bolton donate lots and lots of materials i have there's a room in the bottom of the town center that's just filled with arts and crafts supplies and games and sports equipment and things that all been donated so that's really wonderful so the majority of our budget goes to paying salaries last year we had a staff of eighteen that was i think four in the kitchen and the rest were counselors and then we also have internships that we offer to fourteen to sixteen year olds they come for at least two weeks and they train either as a counselor or as a koan area in turn so that's very very valuable job training they learn to show up on time they learn to be respectful they learn how to consider others feelings is just very very good training for them well most of our staff are high school students and a few college students we do have two or three senior counsellors who are very highly trained their guidance counselors their art therap their people with a lot of experience so they can mentor the college in the high school students and then the college and high school students can mentor the interns so we have many layers of mentoring that go on over the course of the summer and one of the wonderful things that happened that we never anticipated is that for our high school students they ride the same buses with the kids who come to camp so the children come to think of the counsellors as they are counsellor and they run up to them and they hug them and they just love them all through the year so there's really a sense of the community and being cared for by the community and we really are building it's a part of a community building block and it's just so very exciting to see one of the things we did last year over the last couple of years is at the end of camp we give children a ribbon that says who i am makes a difference and each counsellor tells the each camp or how they've made a difference that year and so the children understand that they are important and they are valuable and then we give them a ribbon so they can go and give it to somebody else who's done something very nice for them so they learn gratitude they learn appreciation they learn how to take care of each other it's nice to see the campers taking care of each other and being considerate making sure that everybody is included in the activity so it is i just every july i look forward to being there camp because it just becomes a magical place where you get the support to make all this magic happen we start right away in october thinking about fundraising for the next year so these grants to write grants are getting a lot more competitive these days it's harder but most of our money i'd say oh over sixty percent of our money comes from donations from the public from richmond huntington and bolton people who want to invest in our children people who want their money to stay close to home you get a bigger bang for your charitable dollar here because we have very low overhead people have been very very generous people donate every year it does take public support to do that and it's a great investment because these children will grow up knowing that they are capable of doing great things so what does somebody do if they want to help out well here's the information you can contact us by phone or by e mail you can walk into the town center and talk to linda parent the town clerk is on our board of directors you can send us an e mail like us on facebook there are many ways to get ahold of us happened patients are at the schools now and if you want an application you go and talk to the school principal