Giving to A Small Town

I have lived in my community for 35 years and have always been actively involved in many activities. I was a part of what was called the FLASK committee for several years, which was a group responsible for fundraising, planning and organizing and running our town's annual Fourth of July festival. During the 10 years I was a part of this committee, we went from just a few small events and a tiny fireworks display to being one of the largest festivals in our area and people came from all around the surrounding area to attend our events, which included things like a petting zoo, bounce houses, craft shows and flea markets, a huge parade and one of the best fireworks displays in the state. Our core group of 10 volunteers made the entire thing happen and, sadly, we began to get tired. The group fell apart with the passing of the leader and fireworks expert and it took several years to get new people to pick things back up.

I, however, while having left FLASK never gave up on doing good in my community. I continued to donate to every school and local charity raffle, giving prize donations from my woodworking business. In 2008, I lost my house to total loss fire. My family had long been involved with our local volunteer fire department and I had done some things to help them out, but waking up the morning after my own devastating loss made me realize just how traumatic a fire is for the victims. From that day forward, every time a local family looses a home to a fire, I reach out to see what their immediate needs are- mostly clothing, shoes, maybe a cuddly toy for young children and food for a pet. My oldest son is now a volunteer firefighter locally and I am able to work with our department to get needed help to people through things I myself have or through reaching out to the community to gather what a family needs and getting things to them.

In 2016, I also saw a need in our community for a way to grow more readily available fresh produce and wanted to partner that with a way to teach local kids how to grow their own food... that was the start of the Garden Project. I set up a pallet garden in half of my yard and filled pallets with garden soil. Interested families could purchase the soil to fill a pallet and kids could choose what they wanted to plant in their pallets and were asked to come over once a week to help tend to the produce growing in their pallet. What they grew was theirs to take and eat. Unclaimed pallets I planted and tended myself. Unfortunately, interest in the project wasn't very high and very few families took advantage of the opportunity to have their children plant gardens. Those children who did participate loved it and went on to plant gardens at home. Produce grown by me in this community garden was donated to those in need in my community. Health issues and lack of interest by the community made this a one year project, though it did get the interest of our local newspaper that year. Many of the pallets have now been repurposed to another community member who is attempting to do the same thing in 2020.

In 2019, I began seeing on our local social media pages a lot of requests for help with school supplies in the weeks before school started. I was working for a local big box retailer at the time and got a discount so I began purchasing school supplies (which were also very inexpensive at the time) and putting together bags of school necessities for families in need. I also added backpacks and by the time I ran out of funds (I actually spent much more than I had to spare but the need was too great to let it go) I had given out over 20 filled backpacks and 15 bags of supplies. While I had hoped to continue this in 2020, the funds just were not there this year... I hope to do it once again in 2021.

Doing good for your community can be as small as helping a neighbor with raking leaves or cutting a yard or as big as donating millions- what's important is to just do something!