The Lopez Island Family Resource Center (LIFRC) invites you to attend their Annual Fundraiser on Saturday, July 7 at 6 p.m. at Lopez Center for Community and the Arts (LCCA.) The event will begin outside with mingling, music, libations,and international street food on LCCA’s south lawn. Guests will then move inside to learn about the LIFRC’s impact on the Lopez community and why their support is so key to our community’s success and well-being.

Our featured guest this year is nationally known storyteller, social justice educator, poet and essayist Merna Ann Hecht. Hecht has over 25 years of experience as a teaching artist and poet working with young people who have experienced trauma, loss or difficult transitions.

She is a recipient of the National Storytelling Network Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling through which she worked in a pilot program at BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children in Tacoma. She went on to work with young refugees and immigrants as founder and co-director of the Stories of Arrival: Refugee & Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project. She was recently a mentor for the Afghan Women’s writing project. Ms. Hecht teaches creative writing, poetry and humanities for the University of Washington, Tacoma, including a course titled Art in Time of War, exploring the consequences of war through the art, literature and poetry created by its young people living through violent conflict and forced migration.

Tickets are $60 and are going fast! Stop by the Resource Center office or the Lopez Bookshop to purchase tickets, call the Resource Center at 360-468-4117 or visit the LIFRC website at www.lifrc.org. Special thanks to the many generous individual and business supporters and sponsors who make this event possible!