Summer of Service

This summer the kids and I decided to devote some of our free time to doing a little good.  We called this a ‘Summer of Service’ although it really amounted to a few hours each week, sometimes more, especially for Ella (but we’ll get to that).  At the kids’ young ages not every nonprofit has opportunities for them to get directly involved in the work of the organization—they can collect and organize items for drives (book drives, canned food drives, etc., in fact some of our service work this summer was just simply going through our own clothes and books and toys to donate)—but Ella and Jack were definitely ready to get their hands dirty, so to speak.  And get our hands dirty we did on our very first volunteer opportunity.  Just two days in to Summer, we spent two back-breaking hours pulling weeds in the mud at a garden with Sow Much Good, a nonprofit organization that seeks to bring fresh produce to communities that might not otherwise have access.  The following week we spent a few hours with a group of like-minded moms and kids wrapping gifts and decorating wrapping paper with Birthday Blessings, a nonprofit organization which brings birthday parties each month to the children in local homeless shelters.  We also spent a few hours sorting through crates of donated food at Loaves & Fishes (this was actually a grimy job—so many food containers had broken and spilled onto the rest and we encountered rotten food, mice, mice droppings, and maggots).  The kids never complained and always worked hard and I think we all got a good appreciation for the fresh food we always have available to us.  Our last available week to volunteer Jack had pick of where we’d go and he chose to go back to Sow Much Good.  It was a great choice as we were there for a lovely, dry, seasonably cool day and it was wonderful helping outside (this day came on the heels of being in the somewhat smelly warehouse of Loaves & Fishes).  The kids also got to take on several projects at the farm that day besides just weeding, including harvesting, planting, mulching, hosing down tools, and even collecting eggs from the hen house.

We were also inspired at a meeting for The Lunch Project’s Summer of Service challenge which invited kids to help solve the problem of children’s hunger at a school in Tanzania (The Lunch Project facilitates a lunch program run by parents at the school prepared of foods from a local farm).  The 900 students at Lemanyata Primary School do not have lunch on days not sponsored by The Lunch Project and $85 is enough to feed the 900 students one lunch (this nonprofit was founded by a member of our church).  So, Ella decided it was her goal to raise $85 this summer herself to sponsor a day’s lunch.  We spent about a month or so brainstorming to come up with a good fundraising idea that suited Ella—and she actually did put a bowl out at our swim meets to collect change and raised about $20 that way—and fortunately Baden’s mom had the brilliant idea that Ella could make headbands (she had made a few before for friends and for herself).  So, we looked through all of the fabrics we already had, went to JoAnn’s for a few more, used a pattern I found online, and we were set to go.  With a little advertising on Facebook and Instagram, there was some high demand for Ella’s headbands.  She made nearly 50 headbands (she kept about 5 of them for herself) and sold every last one of the rest at $3 a piece.  At the end of the day, with sales of the headbands, additional donations, and the change she collected at swim meets Ella had $187 to donate to the lunch project, amounting to 1,916 meals funded for the students in Tanzania (more than 2 days worth).  She is markedly affected by the idea that she has impacted other kids’ lives in such a good way.

Hopefully we can make this ‘Summer of Service’ concept a yearly tradition.  I look forward to the kids having more and more input into the organizations and causes to which they’d like us to devote our time.  I’m pretty proud of how the kids embraced this idea and actually took the lead quite a bit.  This was a wonderful part of our summer and I had so much fun working side-by-side with my two adorable socially-conscious citizens.