Union of Youth

The Key is still trying to save the kids at the High School and Artech with their involvement in the Seatbelt Challenge.

No this isn’t a photo of The Key’s new rock band. What you see are participants of The Key’s Art Project huddled in the cold outside of In the Heart of the Beast Theater in Minneapolis. Heart of the Beast Theater is perhaps best known for their wonderful puppet work in the annual May Day Parade. The Key has decided to try and help out with this annual event and will be making regular visits to the theater for this purpose. Next up: the first workshop session on April 5th.

They Key’s radio show is still going strong and can be heard on 1080 KYMN every Saturday at 9:05 am. Above we have Ruth Amerman and Sam Dunnewold joking on the air with Program and Music Director Jeff Johnson. Soon we hope to have audio links to the previous shows.

City Council approved Ames Park as the skatepark site on Monday March 17th by a 4-3 vote!

Well, not really. But the hard-working skateboarders of the Northfield Skateboard Coalition did work really hard at the omelet breakfast this Sunday the 16th at The American Legion (currently co-existing with the Eagles Club). For over 6 hours Coalition members set up, greeted people, sold t-shirts, bussed tables, served drinks, spilled silverware, cleaned messes, ate omelets, and straightened up the joint. For their hard-working efforts the Coalition raised about $915 at the breakfast. The wonderful people at The American Legion also pledged a $500 check to help the Coalition meet its $10,000 matching grant from Northfield Healthy Community Initiative. This means that over the past four days the Coalition, with help from The American Legion, has raised almost $1900 (this includes the Friday Cup-o-Joe concert and candy sales at the high school). This leaves the Coalition a little over $1000 to raise by April 1st to meet the HCI matching grant and the Coalition’s original goal of $25,000 total! To take a look at all photos, click here.

The Cup O’ Joe Show at The Key was Friday night and had a big turnout. Plenty of raffle tickets were purchased and many people bought bottomless cups of coffee and cocoa. No definite total on how much was raised for the skatepark, but I’ll post it as soon as its in. THIS JUST IN: The concert raised $312 for the skatepark. Pretty impressive considering tickets were only $3! The lineup was as follows:

Joe Strachan
Dylan “Joseph” McKinstry
James “Jo Jo” Wilson
Joe Dobrow
John “Jo” Baldwin

What else did you expect?

Art Project intended to decorate and smash pinatas that had been started last week, but when the giant egg-shaped objects were retrieved from the basement they were still wet. That’s what happens when you put on too many layers of newspaper and wallpaper paste. So instead of blowing on them for 2 hours the kids got creative. The tape sculptures made a few weeks were just sitting around, so….

Funding for the Minnesota After-School Community Learning program is provided by the Minnesota Department of Education

Writing Workshop has changed its meeting time to 3:00 on Sundays. We’re also meeting at the Key (rather than Carleton) from now on in hopes of getting people who are more familiar with the Key. We’re still doing fun writing prompts, nothing’s changed there, so come down to the Key on Sunday if you’re interested in Writing.