Culture

Earth Day clean-up a success for GNG Optimist Club

The new Gray-New Gloucester Optimist Club is off and running, completing its first community project.  The club helped sponsor over 60 volunteers on Earth Day, who cleaned up the streets, parks, and yards of our communities by picking up all kinds of trash and junk. 

Names were drawn from those volunteers, and many of them won restaurant certificates and prizes from local sponsors, including the Fisherman’s Net, Birchwood Brewery, the New Gloucester Village Store, Trails ‘n Ales and the Pineland Market.

We are a local chapter of the Optimist International Club, a wonderful non-profit organization that supports youth and offers opportunities for people to get involved to help in their communities. To learn more about the GNG chapter and see photos from the Earth Day clean-up, find us on Facebook as GNG Optimist Club.

GNG Optimist Club meetings will be held on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 4 pm at the Gray Library meeting room. The next meeting is on May 12 at 4 p.m. and is open to anyone interested.

— Melissa Thompson, GNG Optimist Club Secretary 

The new Gray-New Gloucester Optimist Club is already showing its true colors.  At the last club meeting, members of the new Optimist Club displayed their true-blue colored shirts:

Pictured back row (l. to r.) are charter members Kristin Piccone, Virginia Bennett, Geoff Robbins, Brian Gagnon, George Mathews, Cheryl Jalbert, Stephanie Haskins, Jarod Castanguay and Anthony Dahms. Front row (l. to r.) are Alina Burke, Sarah Rodriguez and Melissa Thompson.  Charter members unable to attend included Jenny Shelley LaCroix, Jessica Farwell, Rick Riley-Benoit, Robin Mullins, Brian Gagnon, Matt Lambert and Stacy Strattard.