My brother rocks...

No offense to the rest of you out there, but my brother Dave pretty much beats all. He lives far far away in the sunshine of California, and aside from being in the Ensign twice now (not to brag or anything :o), being an absolutely adoring uncle to his nieces and nephews, never ever forgetting my birthday, flying out to rescue our little sister's family during a recent illness, he also volunteers at a dual-immersion charter school in South LA called A.C.E.S. Here's what he has to say about it:

"So for the last little while, we've been working with this sweet little bilingual charter school in South LA. It's called A.C.E.S. and it's a K-5 with 130 kids who will be fluent in spanish and english by the time they finish 5th grade. Really amazing place. But, as they are a tiny charter school, they have no money. Consequently, they have no playground. They have a blacktop that also doubles as the cafeteria. Pretty sad.

So a group of us, along with some of the teachers and administrators from the school, have started fundraising efforts to help get these kids something to play on. Our first endeavor is a video contest we have entered through a non-profit called Kaboom that gives grants for playgrounds, and helps groups organize their fundraising. The winner gets $5000 towards their playground. The judges will be picking the top 5 videos this week. However, they don't judge based solely on the video. They also judge based on the activity on the project's Kaboom page. Which is where you guys come in. Since we only started fundraising a few weeks ago, we don't have very many members or very much activity on our project page. So if you guys have a minute, I'd really appreciate it if you'd join our project. And since they'll announce the top 5 this weekend, the sooner the better."

I hardly ever get to do something for Dave, so this is something I'm hoping will make a difference for him and these cute kids he's learned to love. Will you help me??? All you have to do is click on this link: ACES Playground, set up a quick username and password and then join the ACES Playground project by clicking on the orange bar at the top of their site. No obligation to do anything beyond that (feel free to use a junk mail account--I did!). At their site, you can check out the cute video Dave made and you can feel good doing something for kids that don't have nearly as much as we do...

This is a time-sensitive project, so the sooner the better.

Thanks, everyone!!!