A group of students from Chenango Forks High School has reached out to make life a little better in a community more than 4,000 miles away.
The students, who are members of the school's Model United Nations Club, donated $365 at the end of the last school year to help restore clean drinking water to the small Lithuanian city of Siauliai.
"We're always debating ways to help people. This was a great way to actually do something," said Amand Stark, 17, a senior, and one of 15 club members last year.
The Chenango Forks students and their peers from eight other high schools from central New York chose the Lithuanian project during a regional conference sponsored last spring by the Chenango Forks club, said Carolyn Schmidt, club adviser.
The Lithuanian project, called "Wells: What is in the Water We Drink?" had been posted on the Internet through an organization called the Virtual Foundation. The Foundation is a U.S.-based private environmental organization, founded in 1996, to help citizen groups improve their environment, health and quality of life.
Organizations from around the world can submit small-scale funding requests to the foundation. The foundation, in turn, selects certain proposals and displays them on the Internet in hopes of finding potential donors.
The project, chosen by the local students, had been submitted by a small environmental organization in Lithuania that called the quality of drinking water in Siauliai "very bad" because of harmful amounts of iron, pollutants and sediments.
The students choose the Lithuanian project from five she had submitted to them, Schmidt said. She thinks the students picked the Lithuanian project because it dealt with a public health issue.
The project is a good one because it has direct human health benefits, said Nate Goss, 19, a senior.
"We debated the projects and choose to support this one," Goss said.
The $365 came from the delegate fees that the Chenango Forks club collected at the regional conference, Schmidt said. It was matched on a 2-1 basis by Open Society Institute, a New York-based foundation funded by Hungarian-born American financier George Soros.
News of the donation by the American high school students was broadcast on Radio Free Europe over the summer. The funds donated by the Chenango Forks students will start the river monitoring and clean-up campaign, according to a release from the Virtual Foundation.
Reproduced by permission