"This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine."

That message was evident Thursday at the Panther Valley SHINE center as Mauch Chunk Trust Company presented the Lehigh Carbon Community College SHINE Afterschool program with a check for $5,000 to use on keeping the program running.Lindsey Miller, coordinator of SHINE, said that the money will be used to fund the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculum by purchasing items for use at the program's seven SHINE centers."Our curriculum is based on high priority occupations and enables the students to really find out what they want to do in the future," she said, outlining that the students will get Z-space, a program that use a computer and allows students do things like dissect a heart or design a car; and will use technology to create robots."We are so happy to have partnerships in the community (like Mauch Chunk Trust) that really support SHINE and realize that what we do after school and how important it is in these children's lives," Miller said. "We're just extremely thrilled Mauch Chunk Trust believes in our program so much that they're willing to provide funding for the future.Ann Marie Richmond, community branch manager of Mauch Chunk Trust, said that the bank loves giving back to the community and was happy to be able to help the SHINE program."We are very fortunate we are able to donate $5,000 to the SHINE program for new techniques, new equipment to help the program continue to help children with afterschool programs," she said. "We feel anything we can do to give back to the youth, which is obviously our future, we think it's important to continue programs like this to educate the youth.As the presentation was getting underway, students could be found using computers, building blocks and Cubelets, which teach children about coding to create a movable robot using tiny cubes that are programed with certain tasks.The group then gathered to sing and thank the bank for its continued support of the program.