I’m a small-town girl from Hidden Valley Lake in Lake County. After years of being bullied in school, I found music as a path to boosting my self-esteem. I started learning the trumpet at 7 and was playing with the middle school band by age 8. By the time I was 10, while still in middle school, I was performing with the high school marching band. At 12 I taught myself to play piano and sing, and I’ve loved performing ever since. Music not only kept me out of trouble, it helped me excel in academics too. I was able to skip the 11th grade and graduate a year early.
Dreaming of a career in music, I enrolled at Sonoma State University. However, as a starving student working for tips as a guest singer, I saw the need for a “real job” that would provide a reliable income. That’s how I found myself in the roofing industry. (That, however, is a whole other story. If you’re curious about it, you are cordially invited to visit my company’s website, where it’s all explained.)
That’s the background to my passion for supporting musical education, the performing arts and education in general. If the LIME Foundation can help a school help a child excel in learning or in exploring music, I think we’re making our community a better place. That’s the thinking behind one of our LIME Foundation programs, the Turner Arts Initiative (Turner is my maiden name, so you can tell I’m passionate about this program).
And that’s why, even before the LIME Foundation got on its feet, my company, ARS Roofing, began donating 1% of every reroofing and gutter replacement to the school or college of our client’s choice. We started this program to help ease the burden our schools face in an era of budget cuts. Our donations help schools maintain music and performing arts programs. Today however, we make our contributions differently – and even more powerfully. Today, ARS Roofing donates up to 5% of the earnings from each job to The LIME Foundation, which focuses its resources and energy on three areas: education (especially music education), vocational training in the construction trades, and assistance to seniors.
More about these two other areas of focus by The LIME Foundation: We support a vocational training/construction apprenticeship program (the NextGen Trades Academy) and provide free construction services to low-income families and the elderly. This creates a double benefit for the community. It helps prepare people in disadvantaged communities for fulfilling careers while at the same time providing important services to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them.
Finally, the LIME Foundation also runs programs for the elderly in an effort to address America’s obesity epidemic through light exercise and healthy eating. Heart disease, diabetes and obesity run in my family, and I’m really anxious to break the chain and do something about it with this program.
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