Laraway Staff Realize Milestones

     Jim Heath, Laraway's Finance Director, is a 2013 graduate of Leadership Lamoille.  This program, an initiative of the Lamoille Region Chamber of Commerce, engages emerging communty leaders in a 10-month course to explore the attributes and issues of Lamoille County.  Connections are forged among leaders within the business, educational and nonprofit sectors. For more information on Leadership Lamoille, please go to www.lamoillechamber.com
     Cornelius Murphy, Laraway's Farm Steward, was the illustrator for the newly-published book, The Resilent Farm and Homestead  by Ben Falk.  The text, issued by Chelsea Green Publishing, is described as a manual for developing beautiful, resilient and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transitions.  For more information, go to www.chelseagreen.com
     Congratulations to Jim and Cornelius!

Ben & Jerry's Community Action Team Spends a Day at Laraway

Johnson-based Laraway Youth & Family Services’ recently hosted seventy Ben & Jerry’s volunteers for a day of service.  The Vermont super-premium ice cream makers proved most adept at tackling projects on the agency’s 39-acre site to make ready for summer programming for kids and families.

With Laraway staff as team leaders, Ben & Jerry’s folks fell into groups, each assigned a specific task for the day.  Working with diligence

and tenacity, they built a bike shed, weeded an extensive perennial garden, planted the vegetable garden, cleared brush along our walking trail, planted a vast number of trees, dug an impressive fire pit and built a bread oven.

“We are grateful for our new friends at Ben & Jerry’s and appreciate their interest in supporting our important work with kids and families,” said Greg Stefanski, Laraway’s Executive Director

Laraway Youth Art Featured in Installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

     One Million Bones is a national social arts project to raise awareness of ongoing genocide and atrocities in places like Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Burma.  Project participants, from across the United States, created bones to symbolize lives lost to political violence.  Youth in Substitute Care, Laraway's therapeutic foster care program, crafted clay bones to become part of the installation.
     Vermont-made bones were featured in an installation at the University of Vermont in April; they will be part of a national installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on June 8-10.  For more information about the project, please visit www.onemillionbones.org.  Kudos to our Laraway activist artists!