FREELAND — A Bayview School student is the winner of the design contest for Saratoga Community Housing’s new logo.

The Saratoga Community Housing, a community land trust project, is so new that it didn’t have a logo.

But the organization needed something simple to represent the values of a building community of people, warmth and homes.

Ahren Bader-Jarvis, 18, designed the winning logo.

“He is wonderful to talk to; compassionate and very caring about the community,” said Sandra Stipe, executive director of the organization.

“His family is all into sustainable living. It is really interesting but this kid is going to be a part of this organization in the long run,” Stipe added. “He and his mother have already joined. I can see him growing through this process. This is his organization as much as anyone else’s.”

Bader-Jarvis, a Clinton resident, heard about the logo contest after seeing a flyer posted at Bayview School. And he was impressed by the work that the land trust wants to do.

“Community is so important to me; to have people you know well and trust for support. We live in a co-housing community where eight households exist on 21 acres, with one common house,” he said. “Every week, we share potluck-style meals together. So community housing is very important to me.”

Bader-Jarvis said he was not even initially aware that he’d won the contest when Stipe called with the news.

“She called me and asked me if I would be willing to make any changes. I told her yes,” he said.

“Then she asked, ‘You know you won, right?’ This has been a boost in confidence for me,” Bader-Jarvis added.

Bader-Jarvis hopes to use the money to pay off a loan from his mother, and the rest will go into a savings account. He hopes to buy a guitar or a new external hard drive for his studio computer.

Bader-Jarvis got a lot more than cash for his winning design, however. A Freeland Website design company decided it wanted to mentor the high school student.

“We actually started working with him a bit. He is very talented, shows lots of creativity and communicates well,” said Rick Fagan, co-owner of Richard Consulting.

“He has a very good ability to take a verbal concept and when presented with a series of photographs, he is able to put those together in some way that gives a good pictorial of what you verbalized conceptually,” Fagan said.

The contest kicked off two months ago.

“One of the board members suggested we have a logo contest,” Stipe said. “He put the money up for a $500 prize. And we got 52 entries.”

The contest started Oct. 14 at the Coupeville Business Expo. The members wanted something that demonstrated love and a “home.”

“Houses are shelter. But when somebody has a home, that is when they put roots down in the community,” she said. “Community land trust is about building communities because the land is held in trust by this organization,” Stipe explained, adding that the new logo meant more than good looks.

“This is a logo that would be seen all over the country because we belong to the national network of community land trusts,” Stipe said. “We belong to a coalition. We ask for federal dollars, for state dollars, so this logo is going to be far-reaching, especially when we get our Website up.”

Professional graphic artists, high school students, people in the community and even young children contributed logos to the board.

Stipe then assembled the 52 entries for the board’s review and approval.

“I didn’t vote because I knew who the people were. It was a blind-entry type thing and the board members didn’t know who the logos were from.”

After a lot of discussion between the board members, they whittled the entries down until there were six, Stipe said.

“Of those six, two of them were professional, two of them were from high school students, one of them was from a woman in the community and the last one was from a 9-year-old,” Stipe said.

Eventually, Bader-Jarvis hopes to get into multimedia production, as well as become a musician and an arranger of orchestration.

“Ahren has a very fresh approach to technology, graphic design, music and multimedia,” said his mother, Annette Bader. “I see it over and over again.”