This month’s gratification post is for Jay Vaz & John Dulude! Each month we thank an individual, business and/or organization who supports our efforts! We would like to thank Jay & John, two Youth Commission Members, for helping us make the Haunted Maze a success this month! October was an insanely busy month for everyone at the Center. We just completed our first month of after school programming and held our largest fundraiser of the year in September, only to follow with an even busier October! Not only did we have regular morning, after school and evening programs going on but we also had a room dedication, outside events and donation presentations. We honestly were debating if we could pull off the Halloween event, which requires normally at least a month of work to put together. This was the first year trying to attempt this since 2019, where we had 400 people attend so the pressure to try to have it be just as
successful as before was real! We also lost Ron Taylor, former board member, in December of 2021, who was such an integral part of this event, which made it even more intimidating to accomplish. Finally, another obstacle that we faced was we had a large HVAC project going on in the basement, the normal location of our Haunted Maze! Not wanting to let the community down, a staff member suggested doing it upstairs to still have the event! Once we agreed on attempting it, John and Jay never looked back. With the help of other staff, everything slowly moved upstairs and we were able to transform the elevator, hallway, conference room and multipurpose rooms into the ultimate haunted maze! John and Jay were able to operate all of the air compressors to make our scary props move, figured out lighting and decorated the majority of the space just as impressive as the basement in years past! Jay and John combined volunteered almost 100 hours, morning and night, this month to help put on this event, which we are so grateful for! You could tell by all the screams at the event on October 28th that all the work that the entire MYC team, Jay & John and the volunteers put into this event was worth it!