UmattR gives $1,000 scholarships to selected high school seniors who then visit elementary and middle schools across San Juan County to share personal stories about resilience, friendship, and making good choices. The program had more than 300 applicants this cycle and selected 24 students for the coming year, each logging roughly 650 hours of community service.
Students receive trading cards featuring their story, and younger kids often seek them out at community events to ask questions or get advice on tough situations. The program runs at umattr.com and accepts donations and sponsorships through its website and social media pages.
This story is sponsored by Ace Hardware in Farmington and Boon’s Family Thai BBQ.
Our Sponsors
Transcript
I have done UmattR for eight years going on my ninth year, and it’s incredible to see these kids grow in the year that they have. They do like 650 service hours and through that, those service hours, they’re talking and communicating and sharing their, their vision and their stories and how to be better people and be kind and not bully and make sure we stay mentally strong and healthy, make good choices, make good friends. And so that impact on each other is huge because they’re holding each other accountable and they’re, they’re making a difference amongst their peers as well.
You’re watching the Local News Network brought to you by Ace Hardware, of Farmington and Boon’s Family thai Barbecue.
UmattR is basically a program where we give one thousand dollar scholarships to seniors and they go out and share a story to the elementary kids and the middle school kids about things that might have been hard or things that kept them going, any kind of thing that helped them make the decision to make good friends, stay off drugs and alcohol, or be a good role model. Whatever the message is, it’s a genuine story to each kid. And then we want them to share that to the community and the kids in the county
Together We have not only crafted a positive message, but a positive community, UmattR. Our namesake is not just the tagline, it is a purpose. A purpose to show everyone that they truly do matter. Each and every one of us can make someone out there feel like they matter and they are important, not because of a scholarship and not ’cause of ourselves, but simply because it’s true.
We’ve actually had a huge impact. We have kids come and find our kids all over at different events and they bring their trading card and they ask them, you know, Hey, tell me about this, tell me about that. Or they want to know about their story, or they ask ’em questions sometimes how to go through a, a hard situation. So the kids really do become role models and local heroes for the kids and someone that they can actually find and see around the community. We’re looking for a, a leader, kids that can articulate a message through their story and be someone that those younger kids can look up to. They need to have good grades, they need to be involved in the community, in the school in any way, shape or form. It doesn’t have to be sports or you know, certain things, but we’re just looking for leaders and then we’re trying to help them, them inspire younger kids. It’s actually very competitive. We had over 300 applications and nominations come in and we just ended that. And then we had, we interviewed the top 50 in our final round of interviews and then we selected 24 for the upcoming year. So we have a website, it’s UmattR.com and they can follow us on Instagram or Facebook and any, you know, any of those things has links to donate or you can reach out, DM us and we’ll get you a form and whatever you can sponsor and get on the trading cards. There’s things like that.
Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network. To learn more about UmattR, you can visit you UmattR.com as well as UmattR on Facebook and Instagram. And for more stories like this, visit LNN.news
