JUST SERVE

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@rekamdanmainkan

Are you looking for an opportunity in your neighborhood or region where you can constructively serve your community but can’t seem to find anything that fits your abilities or expertise?

There is a website available to everyone that can help you find local and national opportunities to assist charity organizations or minister to those in need.

The program can be found at JustServe.org. The site is geared toward the many needs of various communities and organizations that could use help from volunteers to complete their missions. According to the website, “JustServe.org is a website where the volunteer needs of organizations may be posted and volunteers may search for places to serve in the community, providing opportunities to help those in need and enhance the quality of life in the community.”

The program allows volunteers to find a way to serve their towns, cities, and extended communities and make a difference in the lives of others or improve the surroundings they live in.

As a special project for my grandchildren and me, we have volunteered to help with one of the current programs the JustServe.org site is sponsoring called #MillionGraves. The premise behind this project is to preserve the information on the millions of gravestones in thousands of cemeteries across the country that are slowly wearing away. The information on those stones can provide accurate names and dates for those searching for their ancestors. As the stones weather, the information on them can disappear through erosion until it  is impossible to read. Often the stones crumble until the names and dates they carry are lost.

For this project, the children and I have made a list of the graveyards within a fifty-mile radius of our home. Each week, weather permitting, we will choose one cemetery and take pictures of each stone systematically until we have covered the entire cemetery. If the stones are too hard to read, we will produce rubbings of the stones and take pictures of them.

Once we have completed the entire cemetery, we will send the pictures in a file to MillionGraves so they can archive the information and provide it to genealogy websites such as Ancestry.com and Rootsweb which in turn make it available to their patrons for their family history research.

Other volunteer opportunities include assisting refugees from Kuwait and other countries adjust to the changes and settle into a new life in America; providing cooking assistance for organizations that help feed needy neighborhoods or those living on the street; writing letters to military personnel stationed overseas, and so many other possibilities for service.

There is even a need for remote services such as making pillowcases for children in hospitals or bandanas for our armed forces men and women in appreciation for their service.

There are so many opportunities to serve. Even if you only have a few minutes to help, there is an opening for you with one of the many volunteer organizations found on JustServe.org. Check it out and see what service you can give to those in need. And please, if you do, let me know what service you chose and how it went for you. I will include your news in the weekly JustServe post. Better yet, you can write about your experience and post it on my blog as a guest author. Be sure to take pictures and share!