Huntington Beach volunteers gather for large-scale community service project
Alex Willis was one of hundreds of volunteers of all ages who shuttled through the gymnasium doors at a local church Wednesday night.
Willis had been invited to the big community service project by a friend who attends the Atlanta Avenue location of Huntington Beach stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church widely known as the Mormon church.
Many projects unfolded over the course of two hours. Willis, who came with her 13-year-old daughter Evelyn and 10-year-old son Tyler, appreciated that all of them could do something beneficial for others.
Evelyn, an eighth-grader at Sowers Middle School, has been on the lookout for volunteering hours.
Willis sat at a table making blankets for Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and it wasn’t lost on her that CHOC was a place where both of her children were treated as infants.
“To be able to make these little blankets for CHOC is such a personal thing for me as well, right?” she said. “Being able to come and volunteer is nice, but also just getting to hit some of those personal notes just makes it so much more special. We had blankets that somebody made and somebody knitted when my kids were in CHOC and we were desperate.”
Giving back was the overarching theme of the night, which benefited 15 different local charities. Volunteers were church members but also recruited via JustServe.org.
A large aspect of the night was the conclusion of a food drive, which collected 317 bags of food for seniors in need at local mobile home parks.
Jynene Johnson is community service leader at the church. She also serves as the president of the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council.
She encouraged volunteers Wednesday night to meet, mix and mingle with each other to make it a fun event. Live music and light refreshments were provided.
“You can go to Amazon and buy stuff and send it,” Johnson said. “People have to do that when they work full time, I get it, but if they have time to come and serve you really feel it. In our vernacular, you feel the spirit of Jesus, you feel the spirit of giving and of sharing with other people. It’s humanity in action. No matter what faith you’re from, you don’t want human suffering.”
The food drive contents — canned goods, cereal, granola bars, instant potatoes and much more — were bagged up to be taken to the mobile home parks. Other local churches taking part “adopted” a mobile home park, volunteering to take food there to hopefully foster long-term benefits for seniors in need.
“We want to start making some relationships to even help them down the road,” Johnson said. “A lot of these people need not just food, they need their light bulbs changed and their gutters cleaned out. The food is more of a relationship feeder.”
Kate Tanner and Anna Quist, both seniors at Fountain Valley High School, are presidents of the Just Serve club at their school and also Latter-Day Saints. Their club has many different faiths on their board, Tanner said, but service is the common goal.
“It’s so good to see people doing nice things for people that are less fortunate than them,” Tanner said as she boxed up food Wednesday night. “It’s the best experience.”
Aimee Ruiz, the human resources manager who oversees the volunteers at Alzheimer’s Family Center in Huntington Beach, agrees with that sentiment. The center was one of the beneficiaries of the event, receiving beanies, ponchos and blankets as well as Christmas decorations.
Ruiz said the center has had a long relationship with the local Mormon church, and she herself brought food to donate.
“When you get an intergenerational project like this, where you get the young children involved with their parents and the community, I think it teaches a lot of life lessons,” she said. “Giving back to the community is hopefully a lifelong habit that’s formed for a lot of these kids.
“This kind of restores your faith in humanity,” she added. “With everything going on in the news, it’s nice to see something like this.”
Other beneficiaries included the Huntington Beach Police Department Homeless Task Force and Fountain Valley City Net, which had 125 snack bags made to aid with interactions. There were 100 place mats decorated for the Senior Center in Central Park, cork board signs made for Shipley Nature Center and strength rocks made for Huntington Beach-based nonprofit Robyne’s Nest.
T-shirts were designed for Beachside Nursing Center, while Operation Gratitude, Soldiers’ Angels and Giving Machines were among the other organizations who will receive items made by volunteers. Children also gathered in the middle of the room to make Christmas cards for local nursing homes.
Jeremy Celentano is the pastor of Activate Church, which meets in Central Park. He said he was impressed with the scope of Wednesday night’s gathering.
Celentano is a board member of Serve City Huntington Beach, a collection of local Christian churches that coordinate on several service projects throughout the year.
“We realized that a lot of churches are doing the same thing, essentially overlapping what their care and service is, so there are gaps in service for people,” he said. “We’re trying to collaborate more to find out where those gaps are and figure out what we can do.”
With Thanksgiving a week away, Willis said she was thinking about being grateful prior to heading to the community service event.
“It’s one thing to say on Thursday, as we’re sitting at our big amazing family dinners, that we’re so grateful,” she said. “Of course we are, because we have pretty much anything that we would ever need and want. But to be able to do this, I feel like it shows more gratitude and thankfulness for life, to be able to give back. This is it, right here.”
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