Horizon Gives Back!
On June 7th employees from Horizon descended upon St. John’s Soup Kitchen for an all day volunteering effort. The group of 12 arrived at 9:00am, and were immediately split up and given tasks to accomplish. One team was sent off to clean the many windows located around the property, another group was sent to the kitchen to help prepare the meal and yet another group was sent to the back garden. Needless to say, there was a lot of people in a lot of places doing a lot of things. Since summer hasn’t officially started yet we have coined these tasks “spring cleaning.” If you’ve ever been to the soup kitchen, you may have noticed we have a lot of windows and glass. It took a lot of people quite a long time to clean it all out.
While Fr. Bismarck and company had fun up in the rectory cleaning all the windows, a group in the kitchen was busy preparing salad for lunch. Because of their hard work the guests of St. John’s were able to enjoy a refreshing salad with their meal, loaded with all kinds of toppings. Olives, artichoke hearts, cucumber you name it! It may have been our best salad yet!
Out in the backyard even more was happening! Our garden project is finished, but the surrounding area still needs some improvement. Alone we can only slowly improve the backyard, but with the help of volunteers we get such a boost to our productivity! Thanks to everyone for weeding and gardening. It really makes a difference and our goal is to make the back yard shine!
But it didn’t end here for our hard working volunteers. We still had to serve lunch, and when we have more help we can always do more. The needs of our guests are great, and when we have the ability to do so we always make and effort to help those in need. Going above and beyond is the spirit of St. John’s and because we had the means we did what we could to help those in need. Serving extra drinks and snacks may seem like a small gesture, but it is the difference between having something to eat for dinner and going hungry. Thanks to our wonderful volunteers as we were able to combat hunger for one more night.
We still had some time and after the lunch rush died down we had an opportunity to do work that we normally can’t do around the kitchen. This gave our volunteers an opportunity to make their mark on St. John’s. After cleaning and preparing for the Saturday, it was time to get busy. Horizon was given the chance to leave their mark on St. John’s and they took it. They set to work painting the front hall and mulching the front garden. Because of their help we now have fresh coat of paint in the front hall of the kitchen and our front garden is mulched. It looks excellent, although I must admit it still smells of fresh paint. I’d like to thank Horizon for dedicating so much time to St. John’s. We are truly humbled by their work ethic and we hope to see them again soon. We have plenty more painting to do, mulch to spread and meals to serve. Thank you!