Service Club: Volunteering time and emphasizing reuse

I'd like to nominate a fellow mom to genius status. She is lead organizer of our elementary school's service club, and this year had the fantastic idea of using the teacher inservice days (when kids are out of school) to take the club to local service organizations and volunteer our time where they need it most. Last year, you may remember when I wrote about cleaning up donated board books for the Children's Book Bank. Another time our service club got together to make birthday kits, which we then donated to an organization that would get them to kids who might not otherwise have parties. Both activities taught our kids not only about volunteering and sharing their time, but to reuse things already on hand, and give creative new life to stuff if we bundle things in new ways.

Back to our most recent activity... A few weeks ago Friday, two groups of about 10 families from our elementary school went to the Northwest Children's Outreach. We brought with us carloads of clothing, diapers, strollers, car seats, high chairs, cribs, toys, books, etc. Our family in particular brought four bags of clothing, shoes, coats, socks, books and what felt like the world's largest collection of well-loved My Little Pony toys. We took a short tour and learned about this organization, then we rolled up our sleeves and helped sort and organize the donations into kits that they in turn hand off to other service organizations. I was in a group comprised primarily of second graders who counted out diapers from big donated boxes, and repackaged in smaller amounts. We were stunned to hear that 1,000 diapers are donated and delivered to families from this organization each week. Each family's baby can only get 20 diapers, which gives an idea of the vast number of people this organization helps.

Others in our group assembled layette kits, or boy/girl kits that include clothing, books, hygiene items, toys, etc. We've often donated our outgrown clothes and toys to this great non-profit, and we like that the goods stay local. This time instead of just dropping our donations and getting a receipt, we got to look behind the curtain, get our hands a bit dirty and understand better what they do. I hope that my kids walked away with a sense of the need of others in our community: what it would be like to not be able to afford diapers for your baby, or toys and books, or shoes and coats. We have some generous neighbors with two girls older than mine, who hand down their coats, books and My Little Pony toys when their kids outgrow them. My kids appreciate the bounty, knowing I sure wouldn't have bought them that many ponies new (ooh -- just the packaging alone! I shudder to think of it!). They play with them, and then pass them on, in the hope that these toys will bring some happiness to another kid who lives locally.

The secret joy of our efforts with the Service Club is that very often we are finding ways to reinforce the importance of REUSE, one of the key components of the Reduce/Reuse/Recycle mantra. Granted, I've had some frustrations with the slow progress of our school's Green Team, but just love, love, love that our Service Club has some sneaky green moves at its core.