11-year old Veronicah is thankful for the support and love from her sponsor!

Hello Grace Race friends. This is a reminder for those who received packages in the mail to please send or hand out the 5 letters and envelopes to your friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers. Please deliver them by April 12th. Our goal to is raise $15K by the end of May. Thanks very much to you all.  The support from you and your friends will provide furniture, bedding, and dining utensils for the first set of 40 orphans due to move to the orphanage in January 2011.

Hi Grace Race friends!
We’re getting ready to launch a spring letter-writing campaign in a few weeks. Our goal is to raise $10K to pay for furniture and dining room equipment/utensils so that 40 orphans can move into the orphanage in January 2011. The construction on the orphanage and administrative areas should be complete by the end of 2010. We will be sending letters to everyone who ran/walked in 2008 or 2009, and including 5 letters plus envelopes for these participants to send their friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors. These letters will ask for a small donation of $20. In 2009 we raised $70K through a similar letter-writing campaign. Many small contributions add up to a significant amount. If you ran or walked in the 5th or 6th Annual event, look for a package in early April and think of a few friends who might be willing to pitch in $20. Asante sana!

Andrew Wanjiru, born May 17th 1994, is one of several orphans who is hoping and praying that someone in the United States will sponsor him. His story is heart-wrenching to read but sadly quite common in Kenya. The letter below gives a brief biography. For $800/year, you can enable Andrew’s elderly grandmother (his guardian) to pay the school fees to further his education and give him a better chance of success as an adult. If you are interested in sponsoring Andrew please send me an email – jfeehrer@comcast.net. Thank you for reading! “

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year, Grace Race supporters!! I want to take this opportunity to thank you again for helping us build this orphanage, school, and vocational training facility in Kenya. Without your help this project simply could not be done. With your continued help, however, we will complete funding for its construction in 2010 and thus provide 100 orphans a better life – a safe and comfortable place to live, complete education, and valuable training in vocational trades so that they are productive self-sufficient adults when they leave the orphanage. There are preliminary plans underway to hold a spring fund-raiser of some sort . This will be an event other than a road race or walk - perhaps a gala dinner and silent auction or raffle, with the goal of drawing more people from Chelmsford and surrounding communities to this cause. As for the 7th Annual Grace Race 5M run and 5K walk, it will be held Saturday October 9th 2010. If you’re the kind of person who likes to plan ahead, you can register online now – just click on “Register for Grace Race 2010 at Active.com” on the right side of the home page, under “Important Links.” Asante sana!

We just passed December 1st, so we are now calculating this year’s total funds raised. This year was an amazing year for the Grace Race! The Grace Race Team began the year with the “simple” goal… let’s raise enough money in the next couple years to finish the build- out of orphanage and training school. What made this simple goal so complicated is that the money we needed at the start of this year  to complete the project would require us raising over 600% of our total net funds raised in the previous five years… combined!!!

However, a partnership with Grace Community Church (www.grace-community.org) birthed the idea of the Naivasha Project. The Naivasha Project was a letter writing campaign that was simply meant to see how much money could be raised when a lot of committed people asked for a little from thier closest family and friends over a period of just six to eight weeks. The goal of the Naivasha Project was to come along side the Grace Race Fund to help us make our complicated task into a much more simple goal… raise the entire $200,000 this year!

Well, as Treasurer of the Grace Race Fund, it is my pleasure to report to you that we had our best turn- out this year with 144 runners and 113 walkers. As of today, we have raised over $120,000 just this year and are still tallying the total amount as contributions are still coming in! We, at the Grace Race, are so thankful to all of you who participated, have contributed financially, and continue to follow our mission. We know that we didn’t raise the entire amount this year, but we are most grateful for setting a new fundraising record and now having ample funds to complete a substantial amount of work on the project in the coming year.

My wife and I were able to participate in the most recent visit to Kenya to see the progress of the project and meet most of the kids that will be housed, schooled, and cared for once it is complete. It has certainly deepened my belief that the Grace Race has the potential to change the lives of up to 100 of Kenya’s many orphans. I cannot wait to go back to visit once the orphanage is living and breathing new life into these kids on a daily basis!

Until next time… thank you again for your help and a special thanks to Grace Community Church for thier dedication to sharing our vision and passion to see this thing through!!!

Kenny Mitchell

Treasurer and Course Director

Here are some photos showing progress on the administrative wing. After the walls are finished, they will erect the roof. A crane will be brought on site. Meanwhile, crops are growing over nearly 5 acres of land and the crops are being sold to generate revenue for the project. Halfway through our trip, it rained and brought long-awaited relief from a crushing drought – the worst in many years. The rain transformed the farmland from dusty brown to green in just a couple days. Exciting things happening – your contributions at work. Thank you! 

 Hi friends! Our recent trip to Kenya went well and we will soon be posting some photos and videos of the progress on the construction of the orphanage and vocational school that your donations are enabling. Our team (Michael Fletcher, Kenny and Shayne Mitchell, and John Feehrer) spent the last week of October in Naivasha. We had a chance to work a bit on the construction of the administrative wing, working alongside men who are paid only a few dollars a week working with a very limited tool set. We quickly found that we could not keep up with these men in mixing cement, but got a glimpse into what they do to put food on the table for their families. Thanks to your support this year, we expect that the construction of this part as well as the girls’ and boys’ dormitories will complete in the spring and that orphans can begin moving in shortly thereafter! The orphanage will house up to 50 girls and 50 boys. We spent a day visiting with the Grace Family orphans, many of whom are shown in the photograph below. Their bright smiles, their enthusiasm for learning, and their faith – despite the many obstacles they’ve faced in their short lives – were encouraging to us. Some of the stories were heart-breaking, though. The tribal clashes and post-election violence that erupted in early 2007 left many families displaced and sadly increased the population of orphans in Naivasha. Here is the story of one 8-year old boy named John expressed on a hand-written letter in rough English that we received from Bishop Kimemia in Naivasha ….”John Kamau Mbugua was the second child of Judy Wambui Kamau who was a single mother of John Kamau and Eunice Wanjiru Kama. They were happily staying in Eldoret town with their mother who was a business lady and was providing to her children. The tragedy came in during the 2007 election clashes. The mother was killed during these tribal clashes in Eldoret and their home was burnt up with everything. The children were left with their old grandfather who is old, jobless, displaced, and with other children to cater. They have a small house in Naivasha [Kihoto area] whereby eating, shelter, and schooling is difficult. The sister of John was taken by a different family. This child is very needy. Please assist him.” There are others like young John whose parent or parents were killed in the clashes. There are orphans whose guardians are grandparents or even great-grandparents and are simply unable to provide adequately for the children. This is why we need to complete the orphanage, to provide a decent place for these kids to live, learn, and grow. Bishop Kimemia’s vision of providing room, board, elementary-to-high school education, and practical vocational training to 100 kids is a beautiful one. With the funds raised this year, we’re over half way there. With your continued help and by God’s grace we will work together in completing this project!  If you’ve helped the Grace Race in some way you are helping to give kids like John a better life, a full education, and ultimately the means to earn a living. You are a critical part in bringing hope to kids who have none. As they say in Kenya … “Asante sana” – thank you!

We had a great turnout on Oct. 10th. 280 total registered for the walk and run (pre-register and race-day registration combined) and 257 participated – twice as many as last year! It was a day for new records too. Casey Moulton of Pelham NH, a top New England runner who runs for Greater Lowell Road Runners, set a new course record of 25:25. (And his brother Patrick won the Hartford Marathon the same day!) Kara Haas of Chelmsford, another GLRR standout, broke the women’s record set by Julie Spolidoro last year, running 29:34. This was our first year with the new-and-improved course. We eliminated the loops around the building, added a little jog in the neighborhoods off Turnpike Rd. to make up the distance, and had it re-certified by USATF over the summer.

Bill Rozen’s True Timing Inc. did a fine job with the timing and finish line services including a nice finish-line archway – thank you Bill for your support and partnership! Music at the finish line contributed to the festival atmosphere. We also had the official Marx Running lead-runner vehicle escort this year, thanks to Mark Coddaire who brought his contingent of GLRR runners.

There was quite a spread of refreshments after the race including fruit, bagels, pizza, burgers and hot dogs. An espresso coffee bar in the gym was another new feature.  A huge thanks goes out to the 140 or so volunteers who came to help out on the course, to help in the gym with registration and bag check-in and refreshments, and to oversee the kids’ activities and take care of toddlers/infants – another new feature of the Grace Race that makes us unique, we think. (How many road races do you know of that offer child care during the race?)

We had a lot of enthusiastic walkers too, doing their part to raise money for the project in Kenya. Many of them used the pledge sheet to tap into their network of friends for small donations. Speaking of money, we are still counting it as pledge money flows in over the next several weeks. If you are collecting pledge money, please remember the deadline to get it to the Grace Race Fund is December 1st, and thank you for helping us reach our goal.

It looks like we may break $100K for this year’s net revenue. That is very exciting, because it’s half of what we need to finish the orphanage and vocational school in Naivasha! We will soon be posting race-day photographs on the web site and on the Grace Race Facebook page. Fortunately, we had a number of skilled photographers snapping photos of runners and walkers along the course. A team will visit Naivasha in two weeks to help with the orphanage construction and will bring home photos and videos to show you the progress that you are each enabling.

The Grace Race Team is grateful for all the corporate sponsors who pitched in this year, despite the recession. Welcome and thanks especially to Countryside Veterinary Hospital of Chelmsford, one of our new sponsors, right down the road! Thank you again everyone who in some way was part of this year’s Grace Race – we members of the Grace Race Fund so appreciate your sacrifice of time, energy, and finances. Hope to see everyone back for the 7th Annual race, which will be a year from now, October 9th 2010.

Finally, if you have suggestions on how to grow the race even more or to improve its logistics, please contact one of us. We like feedback!

Thanks for reading and best wishes.

Hi everyone – runners, walkers, volunteers!We’re less than 3 days away … Weather forecast for Saturday looks pretty good. As I write this, we’ve got 177 pre-registered and 120 or so people signed up to help at the race. If you’re reading this and haven’t signed up yet, you have until Friday 9:00 AM to register online, or you can register race day beginning at 8:30 AM. Remember: park at Kronos (people will direct you there as you get close), leave your belongings at the church while you run/walk – we’ll have a safe check-in area, and feel free to check your young kids/toddlers/infants into the child-care area we’ll have set up inside. See you Saturday!