By Frances Sharples

On Saturday, Aug. 12, The CanTeen will host its first annual community garage sale. Held in the CNS High School parking lot, the event will feature food trucks and local vendors in addition to the sale itself.
The sale will benefit the CanTeen, a Cicero-based program that provides opportunities and services to 8th through 12th graders in the area.
Since its start in 1999, the program has helped thousands of students with social, academic, and community support.
“We try to give young people access to things that they wouldn’t necessarily have access to…That could be anything from, you know, just a place to hang out and be themselves, to a safe place [where] they can try out new activities that they wouldn’t necessarily have access to,” Director of The CanTeen Wesley Sweetman said.
The garage sale is another resource that The CanTeen has worked with the participants of the program themselves to provide.
“We’re team-led, or youth-led,” Sweetman explained. “What that means is when we make a decision, we make a decision because young people have voiced to us a need—have identified something that’s going on in their communities that they are seeing that they want to be a part of, that they are having a hard time with…We really try to make sure that as a whole, they’re heard. So [the community garage sale] was something that they had voiced and vocalize[d] that they thought would be fun, that they thought that we could do. And so we tried to run with it.”
Proceeds from the sale will go to the Friends of The CanTeen, a non-profit organization that funds The CanTeen and its resources, from arranging after school transportation for students to food and field trips.
During the garage sale, the CanTeen will host local food trucks like Hughies House of Hotcakes, Grub on the Run, Rollin Cones, and Bob Barkers.
Sweetman explained that even choices such as the vendors at the event stay true to the community values of The CanTeen
“Over the past year we’ve been trying to work more closely with other community organizations so that young people—because they’ve expressed that they want to be involved within the community around—we want to be able to give them those opportunities, so we’ve been trying to develop relations,” he said.
The CanTeen represents and implements these values within its very mission.
“Since The CanTeen, you know, essentially is its own community…we are the very definition of what a community is for a lot of these young people,” Sweetman said. “They meet different people that they wouldn’t normally meet, they interact with people that they wouldn’t necessarily interact with in school. We want to make sure that the community gathers, creating an event that gives them the opportunity to be a part of things.”
The CanTeen is requesting vendors and shoppers alike to come out and support this event.
Vendors can fine more information on The CanTeen’s website, canteencny.com/.