Cheshire's Lights of Hope is this Saturday

A reminder about this weekend:

Cheshire's Lights of Hope is this Saturday, Jan. 9.

We will be holding a kick off rally beginning at 1:30 in front of Cheshire High School. We will be presenting our 1st $2,500 scholarship to Chelsea Clouse who graduated from Cheshire High School in June. We will also presenting checks to our other 2 beneficiaries: Judy Proulx, the director of the Cheshire Food Pantry at St. Bridget's and Dr. William Petit, the president of the Petit Family Foundation. Members of the Cheshire High School marching band will perform and we also asked Tim Slocum to say a few words. Immediately following the rally we will send out a group of volunteers to light the Mile of Hope (From Bartlem Park to Cheshire Academy).

A little history about our event since many feel it just began following the Petit tragedy.

This event started in 2005, 2 years before the Petit tragedy, in our Contour Drive neighborhood. It was a way to unify our neighborhood while raising money for Relay for Life. The following year, we added a couple of more streets and raised funds for the Ct Chapter of the MS Society.

After the events of July 26, 2007, we felt the need to bring this event town wide in order to help Cheshire begin the healing process from this horrendous tragedy and to help our neighbor, Bill Petit.

Today, we are a 501c3 charity and we continue to unite the town while raising money for local charities.

This is a total grass roots organization made up of many of our friends and neighbors. We all donate our time and energy to making this a successful event.

This town has a tremendous group of businesses who are willing to step forward and donate monetarily of through goods and services to assist us.

To date, Cheshire's Lights of Hope has raised over $250,000.

We hope that through our scholarship, we will teach the youth of our community the importance of giving back through volunteerism. We have already seen that through the number of events we have held to prepare for this event.

If you would like more information about our event, you can visit our web site Cheshire's Lights of Hope or:

Luminaries can still be purchased at R.W. Hine for $10 per kit (contains 10 bags,10 candles, 10 cups).

Donations can be made to:
Cheshire's Lights of Hope
P.O. Box 553
Cheshire, CT 06410

For more info you can email us at: info@cheshireslightsofhope.com

We are still looking for volunteers to assist with the set up on Saturday and the clean up on Sunday. Anyone interested can contact Edmonde Bernier at:

volunteer@cheshireslightsofhope.com

Thanks again.

Don Walsh