This year, I wanted to start a family tradition of giving not only our money and physical gifts, but also our gift of time and labor to help others. I looked for a community service opportunity that Princess and I could participate in together. With a little help from my sister who works in the non-profit world, I found a great organization called Kids Meals. It is a non-profit that provides free lunches to children who are too young to go to school. For many kids, this is their only square meal each day. I was excited to learn that they welcome children volunteers. Princess was excited to spend a morning having one-on-one time with me.
We showed up around 9AM and we were immediately put to work packing lunches. We were a group of 5 adults and 2 children and we packed 800 sack lunches in less than 3 hours.
Sitting on one of the bags that we packed full of sack lunches.
This bag has 80 lunches in it.
The other adults were part of a group from Starbucks, who were very involved in the community. I learned that Starbucks employees participate in a community service event about once a month. I am impressed! Anyway, they made it alot of fun. They were very competitive and a little sarcastic and did alot of trash talking, all in the name of giving back to the community. Princess also had a great time decorating the lunch sacks, sorting through oranges, transporting bags and juices and sandwiches, and doing whatever the other little girl was doing. She really enjoyed it. We both did. We will definitly continue this tradition at Christmas time and even other times of the year. I would love for community service to become just a regular part of what our family does, any time of year. This was a good start.
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