Community Service Day at YWCA & Youthcare

Today we went to the YWCA Phillis Wheatly Branch & the downtown YouthCare location for our annual community service day. Half of our volunteers went to YWCA to help with their donations; the YWCA supports homeless families in need of assistance. The other half of our team cooked and served lunch at YouthCare, an organization helping the homeless young adults in Seattle.

At YWCA we first got a tour of their amazing facility serving the families in the area. Throughout the day we organized donations and did yard work. Then we put together goodie bags full of food, hygiene items, and other snacks for after school programs.  Having these items prepackaged made them easy to hand out to anyone stopping by that needed a few things to get them though.

Our last big project for the day was moving all the donations in storage from a shed to a brand new donated shipping container. It was a lot of food to move and organize but it looked really great when we are all done!

At YouthCare our group first planned out the meal they were going to prepare and serve. A few weeks before our community service day; I worked with the YouthCare volunteer coordinator who provided a list of suggested foods we could prepare and food donation ideas; together we figured out the menu we would serve. In the next day or so we had brokers donate all the ingredients we needed for the meal and a bit extra too. Creating the collection worked out really great, so those that could not participate in cooking and serving could still be apart of our community service day.

Once bringing over the raised money and donations to the Orin location in Downtown Seattle. We got to work chopping and cooking. After serving the meals; which is defiantly the best part, we cleaned up the kitchen and took our group photo.

If you would like more information about YWCA and YouthCare please click on the logos above or go to youthcare.org  & ywcaworks.org