Belleview: Food delivery to Ft. McCoy Baptist Food Pantry, Help Agency of the Forest.
Clermont: Food, clothing, blankets and services for homeless families.
Lecanto: Painting and laying tile at the Historic Hernando Elementary school that serves disadvantaged children and families.
Leesburg/Eustis: Food drive for local food bank. Approximately 450 bags of groceries were donated.
From the Citrus County Chronicle:
By Nancy Kennedy
By 9 a.m. Saturday, the Family Resource Center building in Hernando was well on its way to getting a much-needed facelift.
About 70 volunteers, from youths and adults from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Lecanto to some homeless people from the area, came together as part of “The Helping Hands and Linking Arms Project,” organized by Elder Walter González, who presides over LDS church affairs for the southeastern United States.
The goal of the day of service was to bring LDS church members and community groups together to serve their common communities.
“There’s a total of 550 projects going on today across the southeast, and this is just one of them,” said Douglas Carter, stake president.
Each local congregation is called a ward, with about eight wards in a stake. The local stake encompasses Citrus, Lake and Sumter counties.
Carter said approximately 88 stakes (between 600 to 700 wards) were involved in the mass day of service.
Some of the other projects included: food and blood drives; distributing food, blankets and clothing to the homeless; landscaping an old cemetery; park clean up, health fairs and even taking kids with special needs fishing.
“They estimate this day covers 250,000 volunteer hours from 35,000 church members and 17,000 nonmembers,” Carter said.
For 15-year-old Shelby Fulford, it meant painting with her friends from church.
“We have a service project once a month,” she said. “We do things like going to people’s houses to clean behind their refrigerators or clean up the roads around our church.
“We come here (to the Family Resource Center) every Christmas and wrap presents. That’s my favorite,” she said.
For church member Heather McLeod, this day brought back nostalgic memories.
“I grew up here — went to school here for first and second grade,” she said of the Historic Hernando Elementary School where the Family Resource Center shares space with other community organizations and groups.
Currently a teacher at Inverness Primary School and a church member, McLeod said it felt good to be able to do something meaningful for the families who are served by the center.
“One of the main reasons this is being done right now — this side of the building that they’re painting had started to peel,” said Ginger West, director of the resource center. “The day care depends on the building looking nice for their accreditation, so we’ll do anything to keep our day care, because that is an important, important group. It’s the birth to (age) 3 Head Start group, and that allows moms to be able to work so they can support their families so they don’t end up being homeless.”
West said this isn’t the first time she’s benefited from the local LDS church members.
“They’ve always been helpful to us,” she said. “This is just the first time we’ve had so many all at once.”
In the past year, the church has made a concerted effort to become more involved in partnering with other churches and community agencies to better serve the community.
Last Thanksgiving, the church donated $8,500 worth of food from the Bishop’s Storehouse to help the New Church Without Walls and other agencies feed the hungry in Citrus County, plus another $30,000 worth of food at Christmas was distributed to the hungry in Citrus, Lake and Sumter counties.
“We’ve tried really hard to involve partner organizations outside the church to foster a community atmosphere and have the community work together,” said Carter. “When we work together in a unified way, we’re able to get a lot more done.”
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