Colleen McGuire and her grandfather Tom hula hoop during Sunday Funday at the Mosquito Lake Community Center.
The Mosquito Lake Community Center will host a free art camp for children starting July 5 and running six weeks. It’s funded by a $14,000 grant from the Rasmuson Foundation.
Community center organizer Erika Merklin said she was encouraged to apply for the grant by foundation president and CEO Diane Kaplan.
“I already had planned to start a tinker workshop this summer with people dropping in to do things, but this would allow us way more resources,” Merklin said.
The art camp will run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s open to children ages 7 and older with signups available through the community center website: mlvictorygarden.com. Space is limited to 10 per session. Each session runs one week.
Merklin said each week will focus on a different project, such as construction of robot sculptures.
The camp will be led by art teacher Ariel Rolfe. Grant money will go toward staff time and supplies, Merklin said. The camp will culminate in an art auction in August, including work by camp students and by local artists.
The camp is one of the ways upper valley residents are working to breathe life into the facility, which has been underutilized since it stopped functioning as a school in 2014 due to falling enrollment.
“There’s a lot of different functions to stack. Coming together and being creative is one of them. The space there warrants that,” Merklin said. Another function is food security.
Last year, volunteers installed a victory garden at the center, providing fresh vegetables to roughly 75 households. This year, the garden is up and running again with work parties on Sundays.
“It’s just this really great experience to get together and garden with people,” volunteer Mardell Gunn said at the June 27 work party, where a dozen volunteers installed an electric fence around the garden bed.
Gunn and fellow volunteer Laurie Mastrella said the opportunity to exchange gardening knowledge and provide fresh vegetables to neighbors keeps them coming back each week.
“It was so gratifying to stuff food boxes with veggies (last year) and deliver them to seniors each week,” Mastrella said.
Other activities at the center this summer include a Sunday bake sale organized by Jill Evans and Stacee Powlison to raise money for the facility, a Wednesday preschool play group and Monday yoga classes. The center also has an intern for the first time, college student Ben Sampsell, who is helping with outreach and branding, Merklin said.
“We’re trying to rebrand our image from a dilapidated building always on the funding chopping block to a thriving community center where everyone’s included,” she said.
In recent years, funding for the facility has routinely come under scrutiny during Haines Borough budget talks. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, funding was nearly cut from the budget.
This fiscal year, funding for the center was included thanks, in part, to a rental agreement with Raw TV, the London-based production company responsible for filming “Gold Rush,” a reality show about miners in Alaska and the Yukon aired on the Discovery Channel. The company is paying the borough $7,000 to rent the kitchen and several other spaces at the community center six days a week from May through mid-October.
Merklin said while she’s grateful the funding is helping keep the center open, her long-term vision for the center is a space solely for the community.
“I’m focusing on getting funding to turn it into a food hub for our community,” she said. One of her projects this fall will be applying for grants to support that vision.
In 2016, the borough approved a memorandum of understanding with the center which expired Wednesday. Under the agreement, the borough retained ownership of the building and responsibility for utility costs while friends of Mosquito Lake assumed responsibility for cleaning, light maintenance, landscaping, garbage collection, coordinating events, and rental of the space.
Community center organizers said a new memorandum will likely go before the Haines Borough Assembly for retroactive approval at its next regular meeting July 13.