Change Matters Campaign Will Raise Funds for Shelter Playground

By Susan Lavin
Posted: September 17, 2008

The Change Matters Committee members include (top row, from left) Walker Smith, Andrew Rotolo, Che Brown, Dylan Singleton and (bottom row from left) Adejire Bademosi, Lunden Hawkins, Alison Spatz and Corinne Tomaszewski. (Photo by Joseph V. Murray Sr.)

The Elkridge Horizon Council and Howard High School are joining forces to raise funds for Grassroots, which provides Howard County’s only emergency shelter program and 24-hour crisis intervention services.

Plans are underway to begin a program that will raise funds to build a shelter playground. The Elkridge Horizon Council is an advisory group consisting of people who live and work in the Elkridge area. The group advises The Horizon Foundation about topics of concern and importance to the community and makes suggestions about ways to address those issues.

Howard High students Che Brown, Walker Smith and Alison Spatz are members of the Elkridge Horizon Council.  They are leading the program that will purchase playground equipment for homeless children who are sheltered at Grassroots. The two-week campaign, called Change Matters, will be launched Oct. 10.

The students involved with the Elkridge Horizon Council will be collecting coins from students and school staff at Howard High and elsewhere in the community.  Please be generous, as the Grassroots program is essential to our community!

“ Last year, Grassroots had 23,474 Hotline contacts and 468 personal contacts.The Mobile Crisis Team made 331 community responses, serving 856 people.  The shelter programs housed 389 people, 165 of which were children, from infants to high school students. Grassroots is housed in newly expanded and renovated quarters on Freetown Road in Columbia, where it has operated for 18 years,” the representatives explained.

In addition to Brown, Smith and Spatz, Change Matters committee members include former Deep Run Elementary School Principal Fran Donaldson, Marriotts Ridge High School junior Adejire Bademosi, Wilde Lake High School senior Dylan Singleton, Howard High School guidance counselor Sonya Sutter and seniors Lunden Hawkins and Amy Sichler and juniors Andrew Rotolo and Corinne Tomaszewski, and Grassroots board members Mimi O’Donnell and Steve Koren.  Donaldson and Sutter are members of the Elkridge Horizon Council.

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