A Volunteer Group
This week Love City hosted our first volunteer group of the summer. Summer volunteer groups are a special time for us. Middle and High school youth groups from across the region come to spend a week supporting our mission and learning how Love City operates. We love showing these teams how it is possible to love your neighbors through something as simple as picking up trash and beautifying the area.
The team this week was from Mansfield, in Northern Ohio. There were 70 kids broken into smaller groups, each rotated through Love City as well as other sites. This week they totally cleaned out one of our greenhouses and made some repairs to get it ready for planting. They also mulched and re-edged our school's flowerbeds. There were multiple other areas that the volunteers helped clean up as well. It wasn’t all work, we also got to spend time with this group playing a big game of 35 vs 35 kickball at Westonia and having supper together. Neighbors from far loving their neighbors in Portland.
The Crossroads team after a game of kickball at Westonia
The most beautiful part of this week was Mighty Oak Students working together with their neighbors from far. Third grader Bentleigh was out there working with the group every day, fifth grader Eli helped out one day, and we even had one of our Junior Kindergartners Kayden join in a couple days. That is how they wanted to spend part of their summer, doing work in the community, helping it look nicer, because that's what they deserve, that's what our community deserves is to look beautiful.
Bentleigh and Eli working with the volunteers to re-edge the flowerbeds
Every night when the volunteers went back to their camp they would have a debrief session about what they learned and did at each site. They would also vote for their MVP of the day, nominating someone that worked extremely hard or had an incredible act of kindness. As our group on the third day was telling us about this, they told us who had been voted MVP the night before, Bentleigh.
As encouraging as it is when volunteers come and our team gets to see that they aren’t alone, it is nothing compared to seeing our students happily joining in. When our students join in it lets us know that they are bought in to helping transform their community, it gives us relief knowing that the next generation is already interested in investing in their community. Now, what we need to do is continue to foster that sense of community and help to direct them along their way.
Ethan
While our 1,000 neighbors giving $25 a month campaign has officially ended, we are still looking for partners to help sponsor students at Mighty Oak Academy. If you can join in and partner with us please click the link below.
Fish Fry every Friday 11-7pm
If you are interested in volunteering or to find out more information about supplies needed please email: info@lovecityinc.org or call (502) 272-078.