Typically, an outing for the students involved in Leelanau Investing For Teens (LIFT) would be a hike through a local nature preserve. This Saturday, though, LIFT will embark on a journey to a slightly farther-off destination: Central America.

Established in 2017, the Suttons Bay-based LIFT operates most of the time as a free after-school program for local 6th through 12th graders, with a mission to “empower Leelanau County’s youth to discover and embrace their strengths to become kind leaders by investing in their evolution, autonomy, and character.”

Over time, the organization has expanded beyond Suttons Bay to offer programming in Northport and Glen Lake. Until now, though, LIFT has never tackled anything like its upcoming “alternate spring break,” taking eight Suttons Bay High School students to Guatemala for a nine-day mission-based learning trip.

According to LIFT Associate Director Audrey Sharp, it was never in the organization’s plans to offer this kind of enrichment experience. LIFT was, instead, mostly focused on doing things in its own backyard.

“The idea for the trip actually came from the Suttons Bay Congregational Church,” Sharp tells the Leelanau Ticker. “In 2020, they had raised money to send their youth group to Appalachia for a faith-based mission trip. But that trip got cancelled [due to COVID-19], and the students who had originally signed up for the trip graduated. As a result, Suttons Bay Congregational had all this money they had raised and it was just sitting in an account.”

The church approached LIFT about taking the cash and putting it toward a comparable use.

“They really wanted the money to still be used for some sort of volunteer project for youth in our area,” Sharp says of Suttons Bay Congregational. “And so, LIFT being the local teen center, they reached out to us and asked if we would be interested in doing something similar – maybe not faith-based, but a similar service experience.”

Once LIFT had expressed interest, Suttons Bay Congregational connected the organization with a nonprofit called Planting Seeds International, which “seeks to eradicate the barriers that contribute to poverty by working with communities to provide high-quality comprehensive education for children and families throughout Guatemala.” And last February, Sharp traveled to Guatemala to get an on-the-ground view of Planting Seeds and its work – and to make sure the nonprofit “was a good fit” for the kind of student experience LIFT wanted to provide.

“I ended up being just blown away with their practices, and knew it would be a really powerful experience for our team,” Sharp says of her Guatemala trip. LIFT agreed to take the lead on the trip, Suttons Bay Congregational handed off the money, and the gears were officially in motion.

In the 14 months since, Sharp says LIFT has been hard at work preparing for the adventure, including extensive fundraising efforts and weekly team building meetings with all the involved students and chaperones (pictured). One big goal, Sharp says, was to raise enough money so that no student would have to pay out of pocket. The church kicked in $20,000, but the full price tag for the excursion was $32,000, including flights, passport fees, meals, and lodging. Students made up the gap by collecting cans and bottles and hosting bingo nights and euchre tournaments, among other fundraising efforts.

Removing the cost barrier was a big deal: Sharp notes that, for most of the students going on the trip, this will be their first time out of the country, “and for two individuals, they’re the first ones in their family to ever have a passport.”

Sharp is especially glad these students will have the opportunity to travel abroad, given the life-changing experience she had on a similar mission-based trip.

“I was born and raised in Suttons Bay, and Suttons Bay High School is my alma mater,” Sharp says. “But I ended up going on a service-learning trip to the Dominican Republic my senior year of high school, and it changed my trajectory of life. It took getting out of Suttons Bay and getting out of Leelanau County for me to understand my direction a little bit better. I hope this trip is a similar opportunity for our students, and that it broadens their worldview and maybe puts into perspective their role in the world and the power of collective action and community.”

Students and chaperones will depart for Guatemala this Saturday, April 13, and return on April 21. Sharp says the teens are in for a packed schedule that is “equal parts service and learning,” with a “particular focus on the indigenous culture in Guatemala.”

“Every day we'll have an activity planned in the morning and a different one in the afternoon, and one of them will lean toward service and the other toward learning,” Sharp explains. “One morning, we’ll be going to a rural preschool with a Montessori model, and our teens will be able to jump in and help teach those classes and learn about that educational ideology. Then, in the afternoon, we’ll go hike a local nature reserve. The next day, we’ll go visit some Mayan ruins in the morning, and then spend the afternoon speaking with Indigenous leaders in the community to learn about how they keep their culture alive. So, I think it will be a really cool balance of giving back and also receiving from the experience.”