Citrus Grove Elementary School K-Kids Chapter

Essay Contest

Kiwanis K-Kids at Citrus Grove Elementary have participated in and will continue to do many service projects for our community. We do our projects to help the community where we live. As a K-Kids chapter, we discussed and researched the needs of our community and decided that our service projects would include the Thanksgiving basket brigade, serving the homeless, and the Me Strong 5 K.

Thanksgiving is a time when some people do not have much money for a Thanksgiving dinner. For this reason, for our first service project we decided to collect food to put in baskets. We were not sure which organization to support with this holiday project so we researched on our school district’s website and found the Volusia County Basket Brigade. For the Basket Brigade, we collected many nonperishable items and holiday foods so that families who could not afford a Thanksgiving meal would have one. We put all the food in a basket. We decorated the baskets and made cards for the families. We then delivered them to the people in our community in need. Our basket was part of over 1,900 baskets donated which helped to feed over 10,000 people this holiday season.

Sickness, illness and cancer impact a lot of people. A small group of people in our city started an organization to raise money and help with cancer research when their friend found out she had cancer for the second time. They called themselves Me Strong and started a community 5K people so people could run and raise money for people in our community with the sicknesses. We sign up each year as a cheerleading group and encourage runners to keep going and never give up! That is the message of ME Strong and we are excited to volunteer our time as a part of this great project.

For our last project, we wanted to do more than just collect something. We wanted to directly help those who live near us and our school. We learned in one of our meetings that there are some people who do not have homes and do not have food to eat each night. We also learned that one of the churches has a kitchen where those same people can come to get shelter for a little bit and a nice meal. What we did not know is how those meals were made. The church does not make the meals but needs the help of community volunteers to do it each night. So, our K-Kids club worked to raise money to have our own night to serve the homeless. We decided that it would be a good deed to help serve homeless people and visit them. We get to decide what food we will make and we bring things like toilet paper, soap, socks, and other things they might need. Most of all, we work together and we make friendships with these people.

We have done many service projects. Our hope is to do many more in the future. We did the basket brigade in which we collected non-perishable foods, then we did the Me Strong 5K and we encouraged runners to keep going, and our third and final service project is serving the homeless. Because of K-Kids, we have learned how much we need our community and how much they need us.