Our B.U.O.Y Auction is now closed! Thank you for your support!

Thank you to everyone that supported our B.U.O.Y. auction, including our artists, sponsors, bidders, staff, alumni and volunteers. We are so appreciative of your generosity in supporting Trekkers for this new fundraising event.

Lead Sponsor: SummerMaine Classic Vacation Rentals.

Supporting Sponsors: Cafe Miranda, Crandall, Hanscom & Collins, P.A., Harbor Road Veterinary Hospital , Reflections Hair Salon and State of Maine Cheese Company.

We are very appreciative of Industries Manager Ken Lindsey and the Maine State Prison Showroom for producing all the wooden buoys for our project. Our special thanks to Otty Merrill and Jen Mumford for inspiring and helping to coordinate this project!

Our special thanks to Archipelago, Farnsworth Art Museum, General Henry Knox Museum, hello hello books, Island Institute, Kaja Veilleux of Thomaston Place Auction Galleries, Lowe's, Maine Lighthouse Museum, Lyceum Agency, Maine State Prison Showroom, The Owl & Turtle Bookshop, Owls Head Transportation Museum, Primrose Framing, The Reading Corner, Samoset Resort, State of Maine Cheese Company, The Strand Theatre and Susan & Tim Van Campen.

Angela Anderson Pomerleau

Dona Bergen

Geoff Bladon and John Rasmussen

Phoebe Bly

Kate Braestrup

Sam Cady

Jenny Carter

Jane Derbyshire

Kathleen Fox

Nancy Glassman

Victor Goldsmith

Anne Goodale

Raegan Goulet

Alicia Hammatt

Angie Hritz

Cynthia Hyde

Peter Jenks

Kris Johnson

Lydia Kaeyer

Fred Kellogg

Jim Kinnealey

Steve Lindsay

Jo Lindsay

Sandra Mason Dickson

Otty Merrill

Greg Mort

Jon Mort

Jenifer Mumford

Patsy Munger

Sylvia Murdock

Chuck Paine

George Pearlman

Dennis Pinette

Mimo Gordon Riley

Carolyn Jones Rosenblum

Bjorn Runquist

Marnie Sinclair

Wick Skinner

Barbara Sullivan

Kitty Sweet Winslow

Simon van der Ven

Sandy Weisman

Charles Wilder Oakes

John Wissemann

Nancy Wissemann-Widrig

Judith Ziegler

Lucinda Ziesing

Since 1994, Trekkers has been Building Up Our Youth through its outdoor-based mentoring programs. To celebrate this historic milestone, 50 artists with ties to Maine are participating in Trekkers' first ever B.U.O.Y. Auction. Using collage, fabric, paint, ink, metal, wood, rope and other media, the artists have expressed their individual styles and personalized their wooden lobster pot buoys. 

Trekkers, a local youth mentoring organization, celebrated 20 years of Building Up Our Youth, with an event on Wednesday evening, July 16^th. Over 250 attendees participated in the evening's celebration.

The celebration began at 5:30 p.m. with a pre-event reception at the Maine Lighthouse Museum in Rockland. Reception attendees had the opportunity to meet and greet travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, who was the featured speaker for the event at the Strand Theatre.

Ten of the buoys went from the online bidding to the live auction  with Kaja Veilleux from Thomaston Place Auction Galleries.

Paul Theroux is most widely recognized for his witty and thought-provoking writing about issues abroad, oftentimes in less traveled destinations such as western Africa and Asia. In designing the 20^th anniversary celebration, Trekkers wanted to highlight the use of expeditionary learning and travel-based education in building up our students' skills, confidence and life experience. Mr. Theroux's enthusiasm for travel and cultural exploration emphasized these themes.

As part of this celebratory evening, three Trekkers alumni students had the opportunity to share their travel and experiential learning experiences. The event concluded with a question and answer session and a book signing by Mr. Theroux.

ABOUT US

Each year, Trekkers provides educational, experiential, and cross-cultural opportunities to more than 180 young people from six communities in a rural part of midcoast Maine. With an emphasis on relationship building and an appreciation of the earth as "educator," our goal is to be a part of students' lives from grade to grade and year to year.

Trekkers' long-term mentoring model follows students as they "graduate" from one program into the next along a six-year journey that starts when they are in 7th grade and continues until they graduate. Students are actively involved in planning, designing and implementing their grade-specific expedition each year. These life-changing expeditions incorporate five educational components: community service, cultural awareness, environmental stewardship, wilderness exploration and adventure-based education.

Students collectively decide how they will fulfill the five educational components. They use consensus-based decision-making to determine a set of rules that will govern
their participation in Trekkers, including academic requirements (such as maintaining a passing Grade Point Average and minimizing the number of school suspensions, etc.), along with expectations for sharing tasks, and the agreement not to use drugs, alcohol or tobacco while in the program.

Trekkers teaches valuable life skills and develops each student's self-esteem and leadership potential through hands-on experiences in wilderness areas and community settings. Students study the environmental issues of unique bioregions, hike/camp in national parks, learn U.S. history on the National Mall, and give back to their communities by volunteering with groups like the Habitat for Humanity.

Trekkers:

• Collaborates with teachers and parents to foster personal and educational development in the lives of students;
• Recruits, trains, and encourages local adults to take a leadership role in meeting the critical needs of students; and
• Provides students with alternative learning communities which cultivate responsibility to self, others, and the planet.

Since 1994, Trekkers has changed the lives of more than 500 area youth through its unique outdoor-based, long-term mentoring approach:

• 93% of students who enter the Trekkers program graduate from high school, compared to 78% of their peers (Maine Dept. of Education (2010))
• 85% of students who enter our program in 7th grade stay with the program until they graduate (7% of the students move out of the service area)
• 72% go on to some form of higher education or the armed services (compared to 62% of their peers)
• 46% of all our students choose to take part in our Leadership Program when they are eligible,
  and become student leaders for their younger counterparts in the program.