Community Days of Service
“Community Days of Service” events offer us a special opportunity to go out together into our community to serve. It’s easy for churches to be isolated from the needs in our neighborhoods. These events give us a way to interface with our community that is very appropriate for Christ’s followers—we go as servants. Another “Community Days of Service” event, with even more projects to choose from, is being planned for May 19 and 20, 2012, so please save those dates!
Community Service - Scenic Heights School
Community Service - Bridge Faith In Action
Fall 2010 marked the third year Faith Church has participated in service projects around our community. In 2008 we began with people from our congregation working on 14 projects.
In 2009, Gethsemane Lutheran joined us as cosponsors of the Community Days of Service events, which offered 32 different opportunities to serve our area. Projects offered something for everyone, children as well as adults, and included indoor and outdoor painting at schools and other public facilities, outdoor cleanup projects, habitat restoration, blanket making, playing games with seniors, and conducting a winter clothes drive. Work in 2009 was followed by a community meal and celebration in Central Park in Hopkins. The City of Hopkins awarded Community Days of Service the first annual “Raspberry Award for Building on the Small Town Feel in Hopkins.”
In the fall of 2010, more than 100 people volunteered at four projects for the fall Community Days of Service! Many volunteers at one site worked with fabrics (making quilts for needy people in Haiti and Pakistan, ripping muslin pieces and rolling them for use overseas as bandages, and packaging hand-sewn baby layette pieces—clothing, blankets, washcloths and diapers—that function as a “baby shower in a package” for needy mothers overseas). At another site, people served the community by cleaning up the area along Minnehaha creek. Painting projects at Alice Smith School were another avenue of service. Yet another group picked up clothing for Resource West after flyers had been distributed to 175 homes the previous Thursday.
On May 21 and May 22, 2011, we participated in another Community Days of Service event that included an even wider variety of projects and people. Thank you to all who have participated!