Shelter’s Food Drive Meets Goal: Senior Volunteers Honor Martin Luther King Jr.
By Leigh Ann Tipton, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
Jan. 24–The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed a full life was a life of service.
So to honor him, senior volunteers at several local organizations led a donation drive to help out the Daniel Pitino Shelter.
On Tuesday, those volunteers watched as the canned goods, boxed foods and hygiene items were ceremoniously handed over to a representative of the shelter.
“Coretta Scott King said one of the great things you can do to celebrate my husband’s life is to commit an act of kindness toward others,” said Marie Harding, recruiter for the Senior Service Corps program. For the second year in a row that’s exactly what seniors in the program did, collecting canned goods and personal hygiene items throughout December and January to give to a local charity. Last year, donations were given to the Help Center. This year, they benefited the shelter, which provides emergency shelter and a soup kitchen.
“There would be no soup kitchen without donations,” said Charlotte Statts, the volunteer coordinator at the shelter. “That’s why it’s very important for the community to be involved. I thought this was a wonderful idea.”
The shelter soup kitchen feeds between 80 and 100 people a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. The shelter also provides those who need its services with personal hygiene items and items food stamps can’t buy, such as soap and detergents.
The project was designed to honor King, who was instrumental in forging the civil rights movement. King devoted his life to equality issues even though it made him a frequent victim of violence, and he was eventually assassinated in 1968.
Despite the way he was often treated during the height of the civil rights movement, he maintained a belief that all people had worth and that change could only come through nonviolent means.
“We’ll be donating in honor of Martin Luther King up until February of this year to honor his legacy,” Harding said. “We’ve met our mark of $3,000 worth of donated items, but we hope to go over that mark.”
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To Learn More
To learn more about the Audubon Area Senior Services Corps “Care Enough to Share” project, call Charlotte Statts at 852-6501.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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