Raking lawns for those who cannot
With an album by Maralyn Fink
Back at SJHS on Sunday afternoon, I met up with The Good Wins Club. Everyone having a rake, their goal today was raking lawns for the elderly and ill, who are not able to take care of their leaves.
But first, a little background on this group. As an intern in Dewitt, Kari-Simon-Pieters had a mentor that she shared a passion with for volunteering. They did dissections with the Boy Scouts to earn science badges and they developed a community walking path in a woodlot near the school. The following year Kari’s mentor passed away after a battle with cancer. Catherine Goodwin was that mentor and she is the inspiration for this club. The St. Johns High School Goodwins Club was created in 2003 by Kari.
The purpose of this club is:
1) to expose students to a variety of volunteer opportunities
2) to establish a lifetime partnership between a student and his/her favorite community organization
3) to provide our community with priceless volunteer resources
4) to complete all tasks we accept with pride
The club has 170 members. President: Danielle Stebbins, Vice-President: Sara Uribe, Secretary: Lauren Kelly, Treasurer: Mason Pieters.
The Kiwanis Club is the club sponsor. Also helping out with this group is the SJHS Basketball team with Caleb Miller, Coach and The Middle School Builders Club with Jan Havlik, advisor.
The club has 10-20 community service projects they do each month. The students pay $10.00 to join which includes a t-shirt. They do not have any fundraising.
A few of the projects include: Rake-n-Run, serving meals at the Soup Kitchen and serving meals at the Ronald McDonald House, boredom bags for the children in the hospital, Halloween crossing guards helping kids cross the streets, selling doughnuts for the Veterans, donation to Shinsky Orphanage, help and cook the Community Thanksgiving dinner, helping with Chamber events, clean up the City park, help with local elementary school for carnivals and special events, the Lions Club filling Easter eggs and Teens for Jeans. This is not a complete list of all they do.
I stopped at the homes where this group was hard at work. I was very impressed by the group in how they worked. Polite, keeping busy and working so well together, they take pride in their job. They were divided into groups and split up to cover the homes.
Now I would like to say that Kari-Simon-Pieters deserves a big hand for organizing and working along side the members and to all who help her in any way. This is a hard job that takes many hours for her to arrange the things they do. Kari has spent many hours on this one project along with her teaching responsibilities.
So on behalf of our community, Thank you so much Kari, for all you do and the interest and kindness you show to everyone.
And no, not a cookie in sight!