Cameron Snaith saw a way he could make a contribution to New York City - long before the events of September 11 - and set about forming a charity with a mission of helping school age children in America's best known city.

The 24-year-old Bermudian is the visionary behind the GOTO Group, a charity that provides scholarships to enable talented, low-income school children to attend summer camps which focus on art and music education. The charity has managed to raise sufficient funds to send at least five public school fourth graders to Appel Farm Arts and Music Centre, one of the most widely respected summer arts camps in the country, in June.

The recipients will be chosen by the Scholarship Committee of the charity next month, but the requirement for candidates for the scholarships is they must be academically talented and artistically driven. Only the best qualified applicants receive the scholarships and the committee does not give a preference to race, sex or religious affiliation when evaluating candidates.

Not only is GOTO geared towards helping young people, but the charity is also geared towards raising philanthropic awareness towards young professions.

"When I first moved to New York I started working for a non-profit organisation called Midori and Friends and what we do there is raise money to help put music programmes into public schools and I started there in August, 2000," said Mr. Snaith, the son of local Dentist Kenneth and Trudy Snaith of Somerset.

"Through that organisation I learned a lot about non-profit and charities and how they work. One of the things I found through Midori and Friends is there are a lot of them (charities) out there and very few utilise the energy of young people outside of the office.

"You will see a lot of young people working in these offices but you wouldn't really see any of them attending the fundraising and helping to raise the funds. The majority of the people are mostly older people who are established and have a lot of money to spend, but I saw just as much opportunity for younger people who didn't have the same amount of money but had a lot more energy, in a sense.

"That's where I came up with the idea of forming a charity of my own. The reason I chose the mission we have is my interest in music and also to raise philanthropic awareness among young people. I thought they could benefit a lot from the energy and the enthusiasm of people my age and from my generation."

Mr. Snaith has been chairman of the charity since its inception in November, 2000.

"I formed the organisation with a few friends of mine when I mentioned to them what I was trying to do," explained Mr. Snaith.

"We started to form committees, events, finance, scholarship and marketing, and currently we have about 50 people who are volunteering with us between the ages of 21 and 26. We try to attract people between 21 and 30.

"We began holding meetings last February and we incorporated in the state of New York in June and became a 501C3 charity in September, which means we are tax-exempt under federal law.

"We also have a Board of Directors of which I am the chairman and there is also a president (Jason Liddell), vice-president (Daniel Salmon) secretary (Dana Deluce) and treasurer (Stephen Moeller).

"Four of the five are from Princeton and the other is from Queens University, in Canada. Three of the five attended high school with me and are all very good friends of mine. The most important thing about a board is that you are comfortable with each other and are not afraid to tell someone when they have a bad idea, and are not afraid to praise them when they have a good one."

Mr. Snaith graduated from Princeton in May 2000 and has been living in New York and began working at Midori and Friends as a result of Princeton Project 55, which, he says, also gave him the inspiration to start GOTO.

"What they do is help place young graduates into non-profit organisations to give them a feel of what there is out there other than the profit organisations," explained the young Bermudian, who also attended Saltus. "I was with them (Midori and Friends) full-time but now I work part-time GOTO and part-time Midori and Friends.

"We (GOTO) have raised enough money to send five kids to camp this summer and in the next two months hope to raise enough money to send five more. Our goal is to send ten kids to camp this summer and that costs about $3,000 per student.

"We are having a couple of more fundraisers to try to push it up to ten, which is a number I came up with. Having already raised enough money to send five kids is already a monumental achievement for a group of recent college graduates who have very little non-profit experience behind them. "They are doing it in their spare time, after work and on weekends out of the kindness of their heart. I'm really happy with what we've done and also with the group we've put together. But I'm pushing for us to do a lot more because there is a lot more we can accomplish."

Added the chairman: "Because our mission is so heavy on bringing young people into philanthropy we are really shying away from soliciting corporate donations. We have solicited corporate sponsorship for some of our events, but we're really trying to do this on our own.

"We have fundraising events for people our age and have also taken donations from people our age who obviously don't have a lot of money to give. Some give $50, some give $100 and we're trying to keep it as youth oriented as possible. The end goal is to send kids to camp and if we do have to solicit some corporate donations in the future we will.

"Still, I know we can do a lot more, we have a lot of energy and a lot of really smart people involved in this charity. They are people in management consulting, investment banking, publishing, the arts world, some in non-profit and marketing."

Along with his president, Mr. Snaith visited Appel Farm Camp which is located on 176 acres in rural southern New Jersey and can cater up to 200 campers per session. They have programmes in music, theatre, dance, media and fine arts, with an emphasis on creative and personal growth.

"We went out there during the summer when we were trying to decide which camp we were going to send our kids to," explained Mr. Snaith.

"They were really impressed with our enthusiasm and our vision but actually told us when they met us that they weren't certain we could pull it off.

"They sent me a Christmas card and reiterated in the card how impressed with what we've done so far. We have already sent in a deposit for the ten kids we want to send. The founder of the camp attended one of our fundraisers and he was very impressed."

The selection process is near complete with children being selected from schools in the Bronx.

"We formed a partnership with District 11, which is an area of the Bronx and one of the arts coordinators in District 11, Rina Katz, distributed a bunch of our information to 11 schools throughout the Bronx," said Mr. Snaith.

"We are asking each school to nominate two students from the fifth grade who they feel would be idea recipients of the GOTO scholarship. There is also another school in the Bronx, the Bronx Charter School, a new dynamic school that has a longer school year than the rest of the public schools in New York.

"Once each school has nominated two students from fifth grade, we will bring them in for an information session and further evaluate them. We'll get a feel for which kids should be going to the camp, and that's (selection) going to happen on February 2."

Mr. Snaith eventually plans to return home, but before doing that wants to ensure that the charity is established. He also sees it growing to other cities.

"It's something we can travel with very easily," he believes.

"Our plan is to establish GOTO in one city and then move to another city and start again, raising the money and using it to send an underprivileged kid to camp. That can be done anywhere.

"Once we've created the model, which we've done here, it's pretty easy. Obviously, one of the next steps for me would be to come to Bermuda and do it there. I've already started talking about that with my sister, Malika.

"Our vision is to start GOTO in as many places as we can. Even though a lot of the committee members and all of the board members live in New York, they all come from different places... Canada, Iowa, California."

He added: "What I'm trying to preach to them is we really want to learn as much as we can about GOTO right now and to become comfortable with the fundamentals of what we're trying to do, so that in the future we can take it back to our respective homes.

"It's not going to be that difficult once we set the foundation. That's really what I want to see everyone doing.

"Because of our mission, we want to keep recruiting young people each year and keep the charity as young as possible. Obviously I won't play that big a role in the future, but I will be an advisor of some sort."

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Next week: Local camp making a difference.