Wabash County (City of Wabash)  Project Spotlight Winners

1st Place: Lagro Canal Foundation

2nd Place: Wabash County 4-H Junior Leaders

Random Draw: The Troyer Memorial Library

Nominees:

  • 85 Hope – 85 Hope provides the community of Wabash with much need health care treatment for those individuals who are uninsured or have no insurances. 85 Hope is made up of caring volunteers who give of their time as a mission and a service to provide the medical treatment that many would go without. The community of Wabash is blessed to have this service available to them.
  • Blessings in a Backpack – Wabash – Blessings in a Backpack- Wabash serves all local food-insecure PreK-6th graders with food for the weekends during the school year. Traditionally, we send 10 shelf stable food items such as mac ‘n cheese cups, cereal, oatmeal, granola bars, fruit snacks, applesauce, juice and crackers. We served 540 students at Metro North, Southwood Elementary, Sharp Creek, OJ Neighbours, LH Carpenter, Emmanuel, St Bernard, and Wabash Middle School while schools were still open. During the closures, our volunteers worked alongside both MSD and WCS at the designated food distribution sites adding Blessings prepackaged food for the weekend for students. To send food home for a food-insecure student for the weekends during the school year costs $100 per student, which provides10 food items each Friday for 33 weekends.
  • Education for Conflict Resolution – Education for Conflict Resolution (ECR) is a nonprofit community-based organization that offers interpersonal, community, and school mediations. The most important work that this organization does is twofold: ECR offers court-referred mediations to help Wabash County community members avoid legal costs and to teach conflict resolutions skills. The other valuable service ECR offers is School Attendance Mediations–This service keeps kids with chronic absences and/or tardies from being remanded to the Wabash juvenile courts and getting caught up into the legal system.
  • Junior Achievement serving Greater Wabash – Junior Achievement has 109 local JA Areas across the nation, and together we are the nation’s largest organization dedicated to giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their futures, and make smart academic and economic choices. JA’s programs—in the core content areas of work readiness, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy—ignite the spark in young people to experience and realize the opportunities and realities of work and life in the 21st century.
  • Lagro Canal Foundation – The purpose of the nonprofit, Lagro Canal Foundation, is to revitalize the Lagro community through education, historic preservation and to inspire a movement of restoration in our community. With the help of many volunteers and input from local contractors significant improvements have been made on three historical buildings on Washington Street in Lagro since The Foundation was formed in 2017. Facades have been renovated on two of the buildings. Efforts have been made to preserve the structures by replacing roofs and filling basements with stone and capping with concrete. Funding is needed to complete the renovation of these buildings for future businesses which will provide much needed services to the town of Lagro and surrounding communities.
  • LIFE Center – LIFE Center is a pregnancy resource center located in Wabash, offering free confidential pregnancy tests and limited OB ultrasounds. Also offers a free clothing room for children in sizes new born through 5T. The clothing room includes diapers, wipes, formula, baby food, clothing items and other essential items a child might need.
  • The Troyer Memorial Library – We would like to install a reading area where parents can come with their small children and comfortably enjoy their time at the library, fostering a love of books and reading. We would like to purchase some manipulatives and resources to provide early learning tools to be available to families with preschool age children to assist them in kindergarten readiness. We would like to purchase some IPads that can be loaded with further early learning resources, with the long-term goal of developing a complimentary ebook library and having an IPad station available to the community.We are just in the beginning stages of reimagining how the library can more effectively serve the community and carry out the vision of C. E. Troyer. We are exploring options of collaboration with other organizations in the community with similar goals. We believe that together we can build a stronger community. We are firm proponents in C. E. Troyer’s belief that books (and as technology has advanced, many other forms of resources) are the key to learning; with learning being the key to growing; and growing the key to healthy, thriving communities.
  • Wabash County 4-H Junior Leaders – Junior Leaders is a county wide 4-H project that is designed to teach leadership skills to students in grades 7 through 12. Junior Leader members provide community service through hands on activities with the citizens of our county. Some of our activities include: appreciation dinners, providing companionship to the elderly, and serving at public dinners, to name a few. We enjoy interaction with others and servicing our community to provide great leadership skills to the youth members of 4-H. We hope that through the skills we learn, other members will be encouraged to join Junior Leaders. These experiences will go before us into the future and help us with many life skills.