Alaska Assistance
My name is Phil Cannon and I have been the youth pastor at First Covenant Church in Anchorage, Alaska since 2005. Our church (and our state actually) has a long tradition of literally going the distance and bringing our students to CHIC. As you can imagine however, there is only one way for us to get to these events and that is by airplane. If we were to drive, it would be about a one-week trip each way. In 2006, we paid about $551 per person to travel to CHIC. For CHIC 2009, our travel costs from Anchorage to Knoxville will be double that amount. Our plane tickets are going to be between $1000.00 and $1100.00 each in addition to our registration costs for CHIC. This means that each student from Alaska that goes to CHIC will be paying almost $1,600.00! And that’s just the cost from Anchorage. Every CHIC, we have about 30-50 students who travel from a village in a remote part of Alaska who are responsible to get themselves to Anchorage, which means an additional plane ticket for them that will cost about $500.00 more.
As you can see, we are obviously committed to this important ministry if we are willing to spend so much just to get there. Unfortunately though, there are just some students who simply cannot foot a bill that size and we are no longer able to get the scholarships we once got for most of our students. In the past, most of our students received individual scholarships for CHIC to help them get there, but this year each registering church in the Covenant gets one full scholarship to use however they wish. Some churches will use it to help get one student or staff person to CHIC (or split it among a few) and others will donate theirs to another church in need. If you are considering donating your scholarship, please consider an Alaskan church. This could be a really cool way for your youth group to give and there are actually a number of ways you could take it even further. If you would like to donate your scholarship to a particular church, that would be great. If you would simply like to donate to whatever church has the most need, we can make sure that it gets to someone in need as well. But if you want to go the next step, consider partnering with an Alaskan church and helping them with more than just your scholarship. Most Covenant churches do fund-raising to help pay for CHIC – maybe your group could choose a church and tithe from your fundraising proceeds to that church to assist in their fund-raising. Or perhaps you want to hold one special fund-raising event from which all your proceeds go to assist an Alaskan church. There is any number of ways that this sort of thing can work and frankly, it’d be a lot of fun to establish connections between churches from so far away and then be able to connect face to face when we go to CHIC together.
For more information on how to set up a connection for your group, contact me at phil.cannon@chic2009.org.
