In reading the applications for this year’s Service Above Self Award, I was ever so impressed by your commitments to each of your communities. Each one of you has, in some way, contributed to making a positive change in the community around you and in turn, I am sure it has changed each of you too. Recognizing the needs of those around you and realizing that just the tiniest effort on your part can and does have such an incredible positive impact, is remarkable. Finding the time and energy beyond excelling at academics, athletics or extra-curricular acitivites, is simply inspiring. Each of you is leaving a mark on your school and communities that will long be remembered. Your applications prove that our future, in the broad picture, is going to be just fine, in fact it is going to be great. With such acts of goodness as: community wide clean up days, volunteering at after-school programs and other community events, mentoring programs that foster relationships between upper and lower classman, raising monies for Cancer Awareness and for the Sandy Hook Elementary School Community, participating in single events that brings communities together….the list is long awe inspiring and certainly represents what Rotary is all about …” Service Above Self”.

This year’s winner of the Service Above Self Award fully embodies the meaning of community service in so many ways. This school contributed over 170 hours to community service. They looked deeply into the needs of their community saw that two families within their community needed to have a winter’s worth of wood stacked and piled. Imagine the grateful hearts of those families! This school helped to harvest vegetables that were then distributed to the elderly and to needy families in their district. They grew their own corn and pumpkins in their school garden and then harvested those crops which benefited their own hot lunch program. Students knit hats that were then donated to people with emotional and development disabilities, assuring that they would be warm in the coldest of weather. Through a school grant, the students are building a greenhouse and planting a perennial bed for their school to better provide both healthy food choices and to beautify their school. It is the greater need of those around them that they are serving.

This year’s winner of the Houlton Rotary Service Above Self Award is:

Hodgdon High School