The Family Ken!

We were back to Snowcap on August 31 and Ken brought out all the stops with a work team of his mother, aunt, uncle and the ever-reliable Mitchell. This unstoppable team took care of preparing soup bags while the rest of us handled some serious restocking of the pantry shelves. Snowcap used to assemble food boxes for pick-up, but now clients can browse the pantry shelves and select what they specifically need or want item-by-item. We made sure there was good variety on the shelves from what was available in the warehouse and had everything faced forward and ship-shape.

Snowcap is seeing tremendous need for their services. We'll be back soon to help keep those shelves full!

Back to flippin' asphalt slabs

August 29 found three Return Servers joining back up with Depave to help the Vermont Hills Church turn 7,200 SF of parking lot into more community garden!

This really was a fun project, though our crew wasn't able to stay very long. The asphalt was pretty thin (we've learned that no two asphalt jobs are the same) but then there was a weird gravely layer below that also had to be crunched and removed. A two-step kind of deal. The sweetest part though was that several of the church members cooked up a lovely lunch and ordered in pizza for us! It was so nice to sit and bond with fellow Depavers. An added benefit to an already wonderful activity!

The church pastor gave a great speech and thank you message to the group at lunch talking about how the church strives to be an example to their neighbors. Growing vegetables where we used to park cars - a good example, indeed!

Thanks, Depave!

Return Serve by the Numbers!

Coming up on Return Serve's 18 month anniversary, I thought I would post about our progress:
Some key stats:

First volunteer event: February 21, 2009
Number of people on email list: 94
Number of people who have volunteered: 52
(Percentage of people on email list who have volunteered: 55%)
Number of events: 41
Number of organizations we've helped: 22
Volunteer hours logged: 634.5
Times people have volunteered: 230
Average number volunteers per project: 6
Value of time in Oregon min. wage dollars: $5,329.80

I don't know about you, but I love us.

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Could it be? More oats!

Even though you've seen this before, we don't want you to stop being interested in reading about our trips to the Oregon Food Bank. We can't help it if it's the easiest, most fun and energetic volunteering in town. We just can't stop going. And, to further fuel our excitement, July 20 was our second time with oats! (See previous post for more details on the awesomeness of oats.) Therapeutically scooping, a pound at a time, the volunteers scooped a total of 7,000 pounds of oats Tuesday night. Figuring 1.3 pounds of food for an average meal, that means that each of the 65 volunteers made 82 meals possible. Really, the OFB network deserves our constant admiration. They run such a tight ship and have such an extensive reach. We happily agree to keep coming, oats or no oats!

Please! Drink more! It's for the animals!

So, the Portland International BeerFest is organized (so we're told) by a man who is devoted to animals. Therefore, he invited several local animal groups (Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, Animal Aid and Indigo Rescue) to set up shop at the beer tasting event down in the north park blocks July 16-18. That's where we came in. Asking people for money to buy raffle tickets while they're drinking a lot of beer is actually quite easy, and we found that they're quite ready to give! Indigo Rescue brought nine, 12-week old puppies for show and tell, and that didn't hurt either. For $3, people could spend five minutes in the pen with the puppies. It was a huge hit! How can you stay away from nine adorable puppies? Not to mention that one litter of NINE puppies is absolutely the best argument for spaying and neutering you can find. Another great money maker was a shuffle board table where drinking patrons could pay $3 to try to get thirty points sliding a swill-filled pint glass down the table. These are truly brilliant ideas. Even with all the fancy auctions, galas and other alcohol-enhanced fundraisers that are held every year, I still say the drinking/fund-raising opportunities are underutilized. Let's work on that in the future, shall we?

If a hot dog's cooked and nobody eats, then.....

On Sunday, June 27, a few of us headed to the sweet grounds of Club Paesano in Gresham to help Human Solutions. HS is one of our favorite groups, whose website reads that "Human Solutions eliminates barriers to escaping poverty through emergency family shelter, job training, affordable housing, eviction prevention, and emergency household assistance". The event on the 27th was a fundraising Jamboree complete with a local country music act, a hot dog stand, raffles and games. The weather was beautiful, the event was well publicized..... and almost no one came. A hard pill to swallow for the Human Solutions family who is a very hard-working and dedicated crowd. There's really no explanation for the poor attendance aside from a lot of competing activities on a beautiful summer day. We were there to help the few people who did show, and then we were able to offer help cleaning up and taking down. Humans Solutions and all their clients will keep pressing forward - on to the next big idea, fighting the good fight to end the cycle of poverty in logical, sustainable ways. Best wishes!!

Point us to the check-out counter

Even after the handful of times we've helped the Multnomah County Library, we hadn't heard about the "It's in the Bag" program. These are bags of materials organized around a central theme and including a curriculum guide. The bags are available for check out and help educators, day care providers and parents get a little more interactive with their library materials! We covered books with plastic to prepare them for their trips into homes and classrooms. Some of our favorites (or I should say Shannon's favorites): Llama llama red pajama by Anna Dewdney and Fancy Nancy by Jane O'connor and Robin Preiss Glasser. Happy reading, kids!

Food Bank Pros

By now, Return Serve is completely at home at the Oregon Food Bank. Six of us went back to our favorite stomping grounds on May 20. Whatever it is about them, the Food Bank repack nights bring the people out, every time! We were in one of the back rooms of the warehouse this time, sorting reject food items donated from grocery stores. After quick checks for damages that would impact safety, the good food was sent down the conveyor belt and into boxes for shipping to smaller food pantries.

I'm not sure if you caught the significance of that previous sentence.... in our wonderful volunteering journey, we have finally reached the moment when we got to interact with a motorized conveyor belt. It's a Lucy and Ethel landmark, and we're excited to have reached it and had just about as much fun with it as you might think we did.

Here's to not stopping the fun or the work until no more food goes to waste...

First ever guest blogger!

Laureen hosted an event of her very own! Please read below:

I volunteered to do an evening of book cleaning for the Children’s Book Bank in February. My friends Emily and Shannon had the event listed as a place to do service for their organization Return Serve.(www.returnserve.blogspot.com)

I really enjoyed the evening, and I liked what I saw which is an organization that puts their money into what they do and not in a fancy office and a lot of staff. I asked Tom Myers about having a similar event for my 6 ½ year old grand daughter Eva, and some of her friends. My daughter Julie Rae and I had both been trying to find service projects that Eva could join in, and I thought this would be a good choice.

I was told that all of their cleaning sessions were booked at the time, but if I could collect 300 - 500 books, we could make our own group. So I committed to doing a fundraiser for an organization I knew nothing about 6 months ago. It seemed like the right thing to do because books were very important to me growing up, and I liked the idea of doing something that would get books to kids who might not otherwise have access to them.

I held the event in my home. I limited it to people I knew and their friends. I wanted the event to be small enough that people could interact. There was time for refreshments and connecting with people the first hour or so.

Then we sat in a talking circle so everyone could see each other. People talked about books that were important to them, which prompted some discussion in the group. It was especially fun to hear the little kids tell us about their favorite books.

The fundraiser was a huge success. And it was a great party

that included all ages. People donated 365 books and over $500. So I urge others to consider doing something similar for this organization or an organization you feel connected to.

To learn more about the Children’s Book Bank, visit www.childrensbookbank.org.

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The pictures are from a book cleaning event Laureen and her group did at the Children's Book Bank after the fundraiser at her house.

Putting our best lettuce forward

Wednesday, April 21, Return Serve helped Birch Community Services prepare for their annual fund-raising breakfast. BCS is a group helping the working poor through access to surplus grocery food and supplies, cooking and budgeting classes and community building and support. Sweat equity keeps the whole organization humming so the volunteer opportunities aren't as numerous as they might be so we were happy to help! We cleared the warehouse floor to make room for the breakfast tables, we wrapped silverware, set up tables and chairs, and placed the table settings. The best part was seeing the great centerpieces made out of lettuce bouquets. Perfect to the theme, beautiful, edible! We hope the breakfast-goers were inspired and touched and that Birch has a fantastic year.

Native relations

Return Serve volunteers tore at the invasive species in Nadaka Park in Gresham on April 17. Nadaka was a Camp Fire Girls camp, then was abandoned. The Wilkes East Neighborhood Association is making great efforts in restoring the park. The park is not very large, but is a remarkably dense forest for being located right in the heart of an suburban residential neighborhood. The smaller size makes the task of removing the invasives not as daunting as it is in a place like Forest Park. At one point, one of our volunteers said: "I think this one's Win-able!!" I think that is the general consensus.

One interesting side note however, one of the neighbors whose backyard shares a fence with Nadaka told one of us that she wished we wouldn't take out all the ivy and blackberry because she had always like the privacy they provided. We're so used to working with people who understand what harm the invasives can do to the forests - I don't know that this neighbor understands that the trees that I am guessing she likes very much are at risk. It's a good reminder that education is one of the most important volunteering we can all do. And, reminding her that Metro had a native plant sale going on just over the fence would have been helpful, too! We'll keep it at it, and maybe once we've "won", the neighbor will love her healthy forest more than she ever thought she could.

Keep the wine flowing!

It's amazing what people will do for charity. Sometimes, we spread composted elephant droppings around on a garden plot, and sometimes we put on our nice clothes and ask people, ever so nicely, to please not handle the wine. On March 6, the annual event known as the Classic Wines Auction took place at the Oregon Convention Center. The auction raises money for five non-profits that support children and families. We found out about the volunteer opportunity through our friends at New Avenues for Youth.

The auction is really an amazing to-do with lights, sparkles, prizes and delicious food everywhere you look. We were "Silent Auction Stewards" and we spent the evening encouraging bids on the silent auction prizes which were mostly bottles of wine and getaway vacation packages. (And also, of course, making sure the wine bottles stayed where they belonged.) The night raised $2.3 million dollars for the charities, which is both amazing and wonderful. Thank goodness for the love of wine!

Knowing our way around the place

We were back for the third time to the Multnomah County Library to help push our way through more material! Sunday, February 28 four of us had the priviledge of working right in the heart of things at the Central branch in Circulation, right next to the regular staff. It kind of went right to our heads. We were even trained on how to label media! DVDs, CDs, audio books - all of them needed a RFID tag (Radio Frequency Identification). Then we scanned each item into the system and gave each one a big yellow Sharpie swipe across their spine. One after the other after the other! We made some great progress. I think some of us may have even been pretending that we actually worked at the library, which, for the right kind of person, could be a dream come true.

Trees for You and Me!

Hop on your bike and cruise the bike trail that runs along I-205, and just south of Hogan Road you'll see a pretty little ridge with oh, I don't know, about 156 new trees planted on it. Wait five to ten years and prepare to be amazed! The vision of many, many people led to a Friends of Trees project to create the I-205 forest right along that very same spot. Improving on the damage done to the surrounding neighborhoods when the highway went in, everyone is now pitching in and planting trees!

Friends of Trees really is something special - planting in neighborhoods and in green spaces and teaching the ins and outs of raising happy, healthy trees. And lots of 'em. We did a bit to help the effort on Saturday, February 20 in the sparkling sunshine. Two take-away tips: 1. When planting trees be sure to loosen up the roots that have wrapped around themselves in the pot (this wrapping is known in the business as "the spiral of death") and 2. Be sure to not plant the tree too low in the ground - the poor thing might drown and rot, and we can't have that. Happy planting!

The magic of elbow grease

Wednesday, February 10, Return Servers returned to the Children's Book Bank. It feels like home by now! If any of you readers are in need of a calm and happy space to refuel your spirit, this is it. Come to clean and repair donated books and look out over the stacks of books ready to go to their new homes with deserving kids! With just a little scrubbing and a bit of tape, it's amazing how much we can make a old book seem new. It just doesn't get much better than this.

Building Houses, Filling Holes

Saturday, January 18 was our first Habitat for Humanity build day. Five of us met at Jubilee Commons to you know... build a house! Or, houses. Habitat is working on a new phase of homes at the Gresham site and we got right down to it. The task assigned to us that looked most like what you might expect was attaching boards to the tops of the foundation walls. The glamorous side job was filling a hole. A very large hole, with very wet and heavy dirt. Both tasks were tackled with equal enthusiasm, and I'm sure both were equally appreciated. I may venture to guess that one task was slightly more strenuous than the other, but it probably wouldn't be right to say so. We took a good break walking down the street for Don Pedro's for lunch, and Porter the dog was on site to keep spirits high. Our efforts were also recorded in this Oregonian story. This was the Martin Luther King Jr. service weekend and we thank all the volunteers who chose to observe the holiday with their time, hands and hearts!

OATS!

Having visited the Oregon Food Bank four times now, we've learned that we can never know what to expect. Sometimes we're fishing recalled peanut butter out of donated items, sometimes we're sorting through soup, beans and cake mixes, sometimes there's Asian pears as far as the eye can see, and sometimes... there's oats. January 5th we arrived to find several 1,600 pound bags of donated oats needing our attention. As you can imagine, the oats needed to go into smaller family-sized bags. There were also a few boxes of turnips that needed similar treatment, but that's another story. We had the best time with the oats! Two heaping scoops of oats equaled two pounds, and there were scales on our table so we could verify that we were providing Oregon Food Bank quality with every bag. Hair nets, aprons, gloves and sleeve guards were required. Our assembly line had things down to a science. We finished our first 1,600 lb bag and made an impressive dent in a second before our visit ended. You can see by the photo, but all together the volunteers with both oats and turnips processed 10,076 pounds of food, which equates to 7,751 meals and (my favorite statistic) 121 meals per volunteer. It's amazing and wonderful that something as fun and satisfying as scooping oats with friends can actually be meaningful. We send those oats and turnips to those who need them most - with our best wishes!

Back at Snow Cap

December 19, 11 from Return Serve prepared food bags for Snow Cap Charities. It was a big day of packing a well-rounded assortment of food into the bags that get distributed to families in East Multnomah County. There were eggs, there was milk, fruits, vegetables, pasta and cereal. We also had team working on filling soup bags. The food goes in the bags and the bags go in the boxes and the boxes are loaded onto pallets. In just two short hours we accomplished a lot, but then the Snow Cap folks surprised us with lunch! It was so nice to sit and chat with those who were there, but we certainly didn't expect it. Thanks so much to them for letting us come back to help, and for cheering our holiday season even more by the work they do every day.