| HARRISON ELEMENTARY STUDENT WINS STATEWIDE ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE ART CONTEST; USES PRIZE MONEY TO FUND CHARITABLE WORK
Warsaw, Indiana – Harrison Elementary School fifth grader Heidi Ziebarth is a very talented artist - so talented that she recently was named the winner of a statewide art competition, besting 2,800 students in grades K-12 from across Indiana. Heidi was selected “Artist of the Year” in the 2011 Cooperative Calendar Art Contest sponsored by Electric Consumer, the award-winning monthly publication of Indiana’s electric cooperative community, including Kosciusko REMC, that reaches more than 240,000 families and businesses. The newspaper is published by the Indiana Statewide Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc.
The annual competition, which is in its 13th year, provides artwork for an annual calendar that is produced by the staff of the publication, and that is distributed by electric cooperatives across the state. For the contest, each grade division was assigned a month to illustrate (or the cover), and students competed only with students from within their own grade for the chance to be the featured artist. Thirteen first place awards were given, one for each grade level. Heidi was selected the first place winner for fifth grade, and her winning entry will be featured in the calendar as the May 2011 work of art.
Judges were impressed with Heidi’s original painted paper mosaic piece, and ultimately selected her as the Artist of the Year. She is the youngest grand prize winner in the contest’s history.
Heidi’s artwork was also featured on the May 2010 cover of Electric Consumer, and she was the subject of a feature story in the publication. The feature story can be viewed on the publication’s website at www.electricconsumer.com.
For her winning entry, Heidi was presented with a check for $300 at Harrison’s awards ceremony on June 1 by Kosciusko REMC Manager of Marketing & Communications Troy Cozad. “Not only is Heidi gifted artistically, she is using her gifts in other outstanding ways as well,” said Lemert. “When I asked Heidi what she’ll be doing with her prize money, she told me she would be using it to fund a crayon making operation to help provide art supplies for an African orphanage in Ghana.”
Heidi, who is the daughter of Christi and Tim Ziebarth of Warsaw, worked with her mother to drop off collection buckets for crayons at Warsaw elementary schools. Students were asked to donate what was left of their crayons at the end of the school year for Heidi’s “Great Crayon Melt” project. This summer the Ziebarth family plans to host “peeling” parties in their basement, with kids removing the paper from the donated crayons so they can be melted down and formed into multi-color marbled block crayons for the Village of Hope orphanage in Ghana. Heidi used a portion of her prize winnings to purchase supplies to melt and form the crayon blocks. Heidi learned of the orphanage through family friend Jenny Flowers who has worked with Village of Hope in the past.
The 2011 Cooperative Calendar will be available free to co-op members in October 2010.
Kosciusko REMC is a Touchstone Energy® electric cooperative serving over 17,000 customers throughout Kosciusko County and into surrounding counties.
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