 "Photo: Jeff Day")
Texas Tech students and the Lubbock community planted flowers, wrote to airmen and repaired an old fence Saturday for the most encompassing national day of service.
Make a Difference Day is celebrated nationally and is a day that focuses on members of the community helping the community. According to the USA Weekend Web site, in 2008, 3 million people volunteered on that day, accomplishing thousands of projects in hundreds of towns.
Lubbock was one of those towns last year and this year with about 100 volunteers. Make a Difference Day is an easy day for a lot of people to get involved at once, said Kerbi Smith, program coordinator for the Volunteer Center of Lubbock, and it shows collectively our community cares.
“This year we had three different projects we put on for the community to get involved in,” Smith said. “We had two at the volunteer center and one at a local agency.”
At the center, autumn flowers were planted for a beautification project. One Tech student said she was excited to participate in the project to plant flowers.
Taylor Fisher, a sophomore sociology major from Houston, said she signed up for the event through a volunteer orientation she attended for a student organization she is in and thought it would be fun to plant flowers.
“I think it’s important to help the community,” Fisher said. “Planting flowers might not make that big of a difference, but it’s something the community can do together.”
Individuals who did not participate in flower planting wrote Christmas cards to airmen at the Kunsan Air Base. The cards will be placed in stockings and mailed to the base, Smith said, which is located on the shores of the Yellow Sea in South Korea.
Stockings are being made by members of Westminster Presbyterian Church, said Brandi Schreiber, community impact volunteer director at the Volunteer Center of Lubbock.
Christmas stockings for the airmen will be stuffed in November during National Family Volunteer Day at the church.
Other volunteers participated in a fence-repair project for a community nonprofit organization.
“Hope Community of Shalom had a fence repair project,” Smith said. “They had a fallen fence, which had fallen on a playground, and the kids that go there after school weren’t able use the playground.”
Tech students and the community can volunteer in every season for other National Days of Service, Smith said. National Family Volunteer Day is the next National Day of Service Nov. 21. In the spring semester, volunteers can participate in Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service and Global and National Youth Service Day.
“I think it’s important to participate and volunteer any day,” Smith said. “It doesn’t have to just be on National Days of Service, but I think National Days of Service give people an easy way to get involved.”
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