LONGER VERSION: When I was eight years old, my grandmother and mother, who learned while growing up in Cuba,

taught me how to knit. As the president and founder of Knitting for Needy, I teach students how to knit and crochet like my grandmother and mother taught me. Over the past 4 years we have made blankets for the elderly at local nursing homes, scarves for soldiers in Iraq, booties and bonnets for preemies, hats and scarves for the less privileged students, and our blankets for children in foster homes for a total of over 600 items. This club consists of approximately 45 teenagers who come from very diverse cultures. Over the past four years we have imported patterns and yarns from South America as well as scarves designs from Europe. We then taught these patterns to our members who then knit these items to then donate them to various regions of the world. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. As I move on with my academic plans at the university level, I hope to begin the Knitting for Needy club at the university level in order to contribute an art that has been passed down from generation to generation, as well as from culture, to culture.