When Leelanau Investing For Teens (LIFT) got its start back in 2017, it did so on the back of less than $500 in startup cash. Last month, the organization netted nearly 250 times that amount in the form of a grant from Impact100 Traverse City. It’s money that Founder and Executive Director Rebekah Tenbrink says will change the game for the teen-focused nonprofit, funding investments like a new van and updated classroom spaces that will allow LIFT to become a true full-county force.

“We were overjoyed to be chosen as a finalist for this Impact100 grant cycle,” TenBrink tells the Leelanau Ticker. “And then once we found out we won, it was just a mixture of shock and excitement. For an organization like ours, that was started eight years ago on $470, this is a pretty huge deal.”

Each year, Impact100 Traverse City – an all-woman 501c3 whose members donate $1,000 apiece annually to fund a community giving cycle – selects a few organizations in the five-county region to receive sizable grants. This year, the Friendship Community Center in Suttons Bay – which hosts LIFT – was one of three finalists selected to receive $116,000 grants.

LIFT is “a free, out-of-schooltime program” geared toward 6-12th graders in Leelanau County. Tenbrink launched the program in 2017 in Suttons Bay, after noticing a need for students at Suttons Bay Public Schools to have safe, fun activities to engage in outside of their school and home lives.

For its first five years, LIFT remained focused on the Suttons Bay area, though TenBrink told the Leelanau Ticker in March 2022 that community feedback was showing a clear desire for services “to become equally available and accessible to the youth in the remaining areas of Leelanau County — Northport, Leland, Lake Leelanau, Cedar, Maple City, and Glen Arbor.”

Fast-forward to 2024 and TenBrink’s $470 dream has nearly achieved that countywide reach.

“We are now fully operational in Suttons Bay, Northport, and Glen Lake, for middle school and high school,” TenBrink explains. “We are also doing an exploratory year this year with Leland, and our hope is, after this year, we’ll go full time there. That would put us county-wide. We’d be in all of the public schools in Leelanau County.”

Widening the reach of LIFT has come with its logistical challenges. In the past year, TenBrink says the nonprofit has served over 430 students from throughout the county, marshalling the forces of 128 volunteers to offer activities on more than 260 days. Particularly when it comes to transportation, those numbers have LIFT bursting at the seams.

“Being a rural program, we are required to drive all the time,” TenBrink explains. “In the summertime, for instance, we transport kids from their houses to programming and then back to their houses, every day. And then during the school year, we're doing field trips out in the county and surrounding areas to do lots of different exploration – things like hiking, or going out to the beach rock picking. There’s constantly an adventure. But when we’re serving over 430 students, and we currently only have 18 seats [for transportation], that definitely is not adding up. We need more transportation so that we don’t have to turn away any kids.”

LIFT will use a substantial part of the Impact grant to grow its vehicle fleet from two vans to three. The rest of the money will go toward updating dedicated classrooms the organization has at Suttons Bay, Northport, and Glen Lake schools.

“Right now, our classrooms have been created with well-loved items from donors, which we have been so thankful for,” TenBrink says. “But we are excited to be able to bring a new feel to the rooms. I believe an environment can definitely affect how someone feels in a space, and we want our kids to be inspired and feel like they have ownership of the space, but also know they are worthy of a cozy space.”

While the Impact grant has TenBrink thinking a lot about the future, she also says the reverberations of the work LIFT has done in the past are becoming more noticeable as it nears its eight-year milestone.

“We’ve become a very ‘full-circle’ organization,” TenBrink says. “We’ve had a lot kids that participated in our programming who have now decided to go into social work following high school or college. We have an alumni LIFT student board member now, and we also have summer internship opportunities for our teens that are returning from college and want to stay involved. I even had a teen joke with me recently that they're going to take my job, and my response was: ‘Yes! Please do!’ Because if that happens, that means we're raising the next generation of leaders to do this kind of work.”

Pictured: LIFT Executive Director Rebekah TenBrink and Associate Director Audrey Luksch (center) accept their Impact100 grant alongside fellow 2024 recipients.