pat loughery

I haven’t blogged much lately because I’ve been loaded down with several issues – work and family stuff, both. Please keep us in prayer for wise decisionmaking, and ongoing prayers for health.

Going into this fall, I’ve done a decent amount of legwork in lining up volunteer community service partnerships. One of the things that I’ve taken to heart from my coaching time with Rich & Rose Swetman was to look at the people and agencies in our community who are doing the kinds of things we want to do, and see how we could help. In our case, we want to make an impact in families and with the poor, in addition to ongoing work with married couples in need of help.

After some checking around, we’re lining up volunteer partnerships with two agencies (and pursuing a third).

I’m incredibly impressed with what Encompass Northwest is doing in our area – parenting classes; food basket giveaways at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and plenty of other things. In addition, they are also well organized in their volunteer coordination efforts, and the staff and volunteers who run their volunteer efforts are awesome. Several of the folks in our church have gone through their parenting classes and been greatly impacted. We’re starting out by helping to staff their monthly “family nights”, which are Friday night parties for familes in the valley. This weekend is the first event – actually on Saturday afternoon – and it’s the Harvest Festival. I’ll be doing the whole time, from 12:30-6pm. It should be a fun time, and should be a good start at plugging us into the service network that Encompass already has running.

Encompass is also doing a really nice job with their “Respectful Giving” campaign, which gives food baskets to people at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’ll be helping with that effort as well.

We also are offering volunteer help for the local food bank. As a church we donate financially to it, but are now trying to get into rotation for the food giveaway times that they do. The point person there has said that their Wed AM times are well staffed, but the Wed PM times are harder to get help for – and that fits us fine. They have rotations for groups – a church group will have the second wed of the month in the morning, for example. We’re on the waiting list for a rotation slot, and also have some ideas for drop-in help.

There’s a third agency that we’re trying to get into contact with, but haven’t been successful so far.

What we’re looking for is regular, repeatable, impactful opportunities for us to serve our community.