Day of Service 2010

Stake: Stuart

Community Partners: gleaning effort with local farmers in Belle Glade, SWA (Solid Waste Authority) of Palm Beach County, Tampa Ronald McDonald house, Friends of Jupiter Heights, Habitat for Humanity, 4C’s, Children’s Home Society, The Sun Up Center of Indian River, Male Breast Cancer Awareness (John W. Nick Foundation), Women’s Refuge of Vero Beach, Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Homeless Family Center, Indian River Blood Bank,
Religious Partners:CROS (Christians Reaching Out to Society) Ministries, The Samaritan Center, Old Macedonia Church, Holy Cross Catholic Church, Unity, the Community Church, the Unitarian Universalist congregation Organization Served: gleaning effort with local farmers in Belle Glade, SWA (Solid Waste Authority) of Palm Beach County, Tampa Ronald McDonald house, Friends of Jupiter Heights, Habitat for Humanity, 4C’s, Children’s Home Society, The Sun Up Center of Indian River, Male Breast Cancer Awareness (John W. Nick Foundation), Women’s Refuge of Vero Beach, Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Homeless Family Center, Indian River Blood Bank, CROS (Christians Reaching Out to Society) Ministries, The Samaritan Center, Old Macedonia Church, Holy Cross Catholic Church, Unity, the Community Church, the Unitarian Universalist congregation
Influencers: not reported
Total people involved: 432
Total volunteer hours: 2700

Stuart Stake Day of Service Follow up:
Wellington Ward Day of Service Project
In collaboration with CROS (Christians Reaching Out to Society) Ministries, the Wellington Ward will coordinate a gleaning effort with local farmers in Belle Glade on Saturday, April 25th.  The Wellington Ward has committed to have between 100 and 150 volunteers comprising of its members, youth from the Jupiter ward, community leaders and volunteers from the surrounding community.  Volunteers will manually pick corn from selected rows of ready crop donated by local farmers.  In many cases these rows of corn were previously harvested by mechanical harvesting methods but leave behind many ears of fresh corn that can only be harvested manually. The corn will be picked, boxed and loaded on a truck for immediate delivery to local soup kitchens in the surrounding community.  Corn picked on Saturday morning, in many instances will be part of a freshly served meal that very evening.  The exact location of the gleaning project will not be known until only days before as it depends on crop conditions and availability.  Youth from the Wellington Ward and Jupiter Ward will arrive early to the fields and mark rows and work areas to better organize 150 helping hands arriving and ready to work.  This projects lends itself well to volunteers of all ages from small children to the elderly working at whatever pace they can work. 
Jupiter Ward Volunteers 202 Hours Painting for Day of Service
Forty members of the Jupiter Ward of the Stuart Florida stake, under the direction of Brother Mike Phillips, volunteered their time in local projects on April 25, 2010, the second annual Day of Service of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Thirty-eight members worked with Joanna Aiken of SWA (Solid Waste Authority) of Palm Beach County and twenty-one students from the Benjamin High School Honor Society.
The Day of Service coincided with the Great American Cleanup, for which the SWA accepted applications of less fortunate home owners to have their homes repainted.  Lois King, an 89-yr old had a large home in central Jupiter which was moldy and covered with vines. Her yard was overgrown with vegetation and there was a great deal of debris around the home. Hazards included an animal carcass, a snake, a beehive, broken glass, rusty furniture, and open cans of gasoline.
Professionals gave their time to pressure clean, landscape, and paint the home. Teens, youth leaders, missionaries, and some Hispanic members cleared enough plant growth to make a pile four feet high by six feet wide by 25 feet long. Members and students labored to change the jagged stucco surface from faded grey to southwest orange. Lois helped everyone sort through her things and take out a pile of trash as big as a car.
The home is on a corner of a busy road, and it looks much better and is a safer place. Several neighbors expressed their gratitude, and SWA was grateful, since they’d had a hard time finding a group to paint such a tall home. Volunteers enjoyed themselves, eating donuts, painting each other, posing for pictures with machetes and paintbrushes, holding ladders, and telling stories.
Our Day of Service included three other projects. Charlene Harreveld assisted six people in making 50 greeting cards for the Tampa Ronald McDonald house. Seven Jupiter ward members braved the rain with the Friends of Jupiter Heights to pick up trash for two hours on April 17 in south Jupiter.  And five members helped frame a new Jupiter home for Habitat for Humanity for about five hours on April 24.
Stuart Ward Day of Service Project:
On Saturday, April 24th, members of the local Stuart Florida Ward (congregation) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) provided a “Day of Service” to a Habitat for Humanity project in Indiantown, Florida. The Stuart Ward members provided helping hands to install framing, sheet rock and painting on a new-build home in the Booker Park subdivision of Indiantown.
The members of the ward collected a truck load of clothing for the 4C’s, an organization that provides clothing for children from infant to high school. The women of the Stuart Ward worked for hours sorting the clothes into sizes and bagging them for delivery.
Vero Beach Day of Service Project:
The small community of Indian River County is situated at the northernmost border of the tropics on the East coast of Florida. The Vero Beach Ward is the center of worship for all of the Saints of the county. For the second year, the membership of the ward has reached out to other faiths and members of the community at large to join in serving those in need on the Day of Service just as other congregations have done throughout the Southeast United States.

This year, service was rendered at 12 different sites and projects. The Day of Service sponsored a Blood Donation drive, worked at a community pantry, stuffed envelopes to raise cancer awareness, assisted with beautification efforts at four locations, helped to restore a historic church building now dedicated to the preservation of African American history in the area, assisted with land reclamation at the nation’s first wildlife refuge, provided skilled labor at a foster care transitional home and provided food support for over 160 volunteers from various faiths, cultures and backgrounds of the community of Indian River County. Even the mayor of Vero Beach put on shorts, a t-shirt and plenty of sunscreen to work shoulder to shoulder with private citizens digging an irrigation pipe ditch at Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge was founded by Teddy Roosevelt to preserve the only Brown Pelican rookery known to exist at the time. Over the years, the tiny refuge has expanded to reclaim and restore land around the rookery that had been developed to produce citrus. Many native plants require nurturing before being placed back into the wild. Day of Service volunteers raised a shade house for these seedlings and dug a trench well over 200 feet to supply the sprinklers for the shade house. They also removed debris from a hurricane damaged storage shed near the shade house site to prepare it for use as a gardener’s supply shed after roof repairs are completed.

Crews of volunteers were dispatched to the Women’s Shelter, the Homeless Family Center, the Samaritan Center to improve the outside grounds by removing old playground equipment, weeding and mulching plant beds and play areas and installing pavers to a walkway between buildings. Each of these organizations provides services to people under significant life stress. While mulching a flower bed might not seem like a significant community need, it in fact can create an environment for people in need of a sense of safety, security and stability in order to regain their independence.

Part of being self sufficient is being able to feed one’s family. The Harvest Food and Outreach Center focuses on this essential ability. The Day of Service spent time and gave hours for the second year here. However, efforts to serve this tremendous organization began before the actual Day of Service dawned. A food drive was organized in advance and in addition to the significant outpouring of goods from individual volunteers on the morning of the event, dozens of creates of a variety foods was provided from the Stuart Florida Stake’s portion of the Bishop’s storehouse. Once everything was delivered to the Harvest’s warehouse, volunteers set to the Herculean task of sorting multiple shipping palates of food destined to not only feed the bellies of the needy, but to instill a sense of independence that will bring them out of the oppression of poverty.

The Macedonia Church was established in 1908 to serve the spiritual needs of the African American community of county and is older than the county itself. It has since been declared a historic place and currently functions as a small museum dedicated to the remembrance of the struggle for equality. The 102-year-old wooden structure was in significant need of repair to its facade as a result of rot and aging paint. A swarm of workers from ages 7 to 60 descended on the building to lovingly and respectfully perform a little cosmetic surgery that will slow its decay and preserve our history so that we may prevent its repetition. Workers reported receiving multiple honks from passing cars that were received as votes of support and gratitude for the effort.

Being aware that a positive impact was being made in the community made the hot sun a little cooler, muscles a bit stronger and hearts swell even larger. Boundaries based on denomination disappeared from amongst the volunteers. Whether one was from Holy Cross Catholic Church, Unity, the Community Church, the Unitarian Universalist congregation or the Vero Beach Ward of the LDS Church it mattered not. As one volunteer stated when asked how the Day of Service had changed her, it has inspired her to come back.
Belle Glade Ward Project:
This ward cleaned and painted The Light House Café,  which is an organization that feeds the poor. They had 18 helping hands, and they put in all together 72 hours.
Ft. Pierce Ward Project:
This ward had two projects;  they had a food drive and a blood drive. They ended up with 1005 meals and had 50 helping hands. They put in a total of 300 hours.

Contact Person: monroe