Announcing the Winner of My "Protecting Our Pets" Poster Contest!

Hello everyone! My name is Makhi Ettienne-Modeste and I am the 2022 Connecticut’s Kid Governor, and I have an exciting update on my "Protecting Our Pets" poster contest.

On April 29, I spoke at a press conference at the Connecticut Humane Society to recognize April as Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Month and Child Abuse Prevention Month. The special guests were U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Attorney General William Tong, Commissioner of Agriculture Bryan Hurlburt, Bureau Chief of External Affairs at the Department of Children and Families Ken Mysogland, and Connecticut Humane Society Executive Director James Bias. During the press conference, I got to announce the winner of my poster contest! To find out who won, you can keep reading this post or you can watch the speech and announcement I made on April 29th by watching the video below!

As I discussed in my last blog post about the poster contest, my Cabinet and I carefully studied each poster submission and selected the contest finalists a few weeks ago at one of our Cabinet meetings.  Once we had narrowed the many, MANY posters down to a top thirteen, representatives from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Children and Families joined me to choose the winner. It was very hard to choose the finalists and winner of the contest because I all liked their posters. But I am excited to announce the poster submitted by Danielle Chrostowski from Stamford as the winner of the "Protecting Our Pets" poster contest! 

Danielle is a 5th grader at Greenwich Catholic School in Greenwich. She described her artwork as “an earth with a dog on it. On top, it also says 'kindness.' This resembles how everyone on Earth is kind to animals.”  

I love that her poster is very colorful and that the paw prints show the kindness we can show towards animals. It’s really cute and the poster stood out from the others. I want to thank Danielle for submitting her artwork. She did a really good job and I think that she should do something connected to art when she grows up. 

I think Danielle’s poster is important today as we talk about preventing cruelty to animals and children. The poster shows the whole Earth and says “kindness” which to me means we should show kindness to everyone, both people and animals. I hope the poster inspires kids and all people in Connecticut to spread kindness and speak up for animals and children who need help. 

I want to thank the Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Humane Society for partnering with me on a virtual educational program that fulfilled the first point of my platform, and the Department of Agriculture and DCF for working with me on my statewide poster contest to fulfill the second point of my platform. 

Thank you to everyone who submitted a poster, and thank you for reading my blog. Remember to treat everyone with kindness and to P.O.P. - Protect Our Pets!