Miami Serves on King Weekend

Miami Serves on King Weekend
Posted by Cammie Croft on January 08, 2010 at 04:25 PM EST
The Corporation for National and Community Service features this story of how Miami residents are coming together to green and beautify their community to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Miami project is just one example of how people are coming together to serve their communities as part of January 18th's MLK Day of Service. To find service projects in your community, visit serve.gov/MLKDay.

Here's the post from Serve.gov's Stories of Service blog.

Town Park Village, a residential complex in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, will welcome seven hundred volunteers to landscape and green the community as a way of honoring the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.

This January 16th event is only the latest in a series of projects that Hands On Miami has coordinated in Overtown, one of Miami’s most underserved communities. Last year, Hands On Miami helped to create and furnish two community centers for the seniors and young people of Town Park Village, and two kindergarten classrooms at the neighboring charter school, among several other projects.

In honor of MLK Day, the volunteers at Town Park Village will tackle a variety of projects, including landscaping and “greening” the complex. Volunteers will landscape the areas between buildings and create community gardens, revitalize the buildings by adding fresh coats of paint to the numbers on the homes and buildings and add murals to the local school. In an effort to help make the community more environmentally friendly, the volunteers will work to add trashcans between every building, include rain barrels in the gardens, and change every porch light to an energy efficient light bulb.

In addition to revitalizing the housing complex, the volunteers will also help the community’s residents by providing each household in Town Park Village with first aid kits. Every elementary school age child in the Overtown community will also receive a school care kit to replenish the school supplies they received in August.

This is just an example of the many service projects taking place across the country in honor of the Jan. 18 MLK Day of Service – to find other volunteer opportunities like this one and have an impact in your community, visit serve.gov/MLKDay.