{box city vigil}

My niece, Molly, is a senior in high school this year. Please read her note about the cause she is working so hard for. What I ask is if you take a few minutes and vote for the Box City Vigil on this website. You don't have to register, the only thing is to mark your age range.

Thanks so much!

Hi Everyone! I hope you are all enjoying the holiday season and snow!

As I think most of you know, I am on the committee for Box City Vigil, which is a group of 7 high schoolers that's goal is to raise awareness for youth homelessness in the Twin Cities. We put on an annual event at the Minnesota State Capitol where all of the roughly 250 participants spend the night in boxes on the front lawn to simulate a night in the streets. We lobby with the legislators and try to open their eyes to rising problem of youth homelessness. There are about 3,000 youth on the streets each night and 650 of them are unaccompanied. There are only around 60 beds in shelters for these homeless youth, so BCV is trying to get our legislature to allot more money to the building of shelters for them. Two years ago we were able to get the Runaway Homeless Youth Act passed, which gave an extra million dollars to building these shelters. We would love to be able to get more money given to them.

My main job on the committee this year is the Publicity and Marketing Coordinator. I applied for the a grant called @15 from Best Buy. It is a national grant, but we were named one of the 30 finalists! The top 15 will win $10,000 to help their cause. We will be able to make our event much more effective and help many more people with tihs money.So this is where you all come in! To be in the top 15 we need people to vote for us. There are two ways you can vote. One is online at www.genv.net/bestbuy and the other is the text BBYV6 to 32075.You can vote once each way everyday until January 9th.

Whew! That was a long email, but thanks for reading this! Please feel free to pass it along to anyone else you think would be interested in voting.THANK YOU!

See you all soon!
Love, Molly