|
Community
Involvement
 Mission Outreach Coordinator
Libby
Parrish reports a busy year during 2005. Southminster was called
upon for more than its usual financial assistance. Here is a
list of the beneficiaries of Southminster's 2005 distributions.
Some beneficiary names are linked to their respective websites,
should you desire to learn more about them.
In addition, we make our facilities
available for regular meetings of local non-profit organizations
such as Senior Citizens, Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters
Anonymous, Registered Nurses, and Boy Scouts of America.
Summaries
of Selected Mission Outreach Programs
Feed-My-Sheep
continued each month during 2005. The agencies receiving our
monthly offering were:
Neighbor for Neighbor
Day Center for the Homeless
Emergency Infant Services
Goodland Boys Home
Marshall School
S. Peoria Neighborhood House
Neighbors Along the Line
Marshall School Families
Laura Dester Home
Boo-Ha-Ha
The items given ranged from non-perishable food, personal and
health items to school supplies and baby items. Our congregation
has been very faithful in bringing back the bags month after
month.
We
continued to help out at Marshall
School in various ways during 2005. Once again, each
teacher was adopted during Teacher Appreciation Week and given a
small gift every day that week. We also served them a nice lunch
one of those days. We helped put on a 5th Grade graduation
ceremony and party. Money we collected in the fall was used to
purchase gift cards which we donated to the school for
distribution to select families for the purchase of clothes and
school supplies. And our Sunday School classes and fellowship
groups adopted several Marshall families, to whom we delivered
Thanksgiving gift baskets--complete with turkeys. Mentors and
helpers continued to volunteer hours at Marshall during the
year. We again
participated in the International Gift
Fair in November 2005. We ordered gift items from
SERV (now called A Greater Gift) and laid them out in a
beautiful sales display. Various Southminster members manned the
tables all day. Items not sold during the Fair were later
offered for sale at church. As a result of all this, we may
establish a permanent "International Market" at the church in
one of our unused Sunday School rooms during 2006.
The Fair
Trade Coffee co-op continues to do well. Though this
coffee and tea is set up on display once a month, it remains
available for members or visitors to buy at the church office
any time. At the end of 2005, there were about a dozen churches
getting their coffee and tea from the co-op, including
non-Presbyterian churches such as All Souls Unitarian, Church of
the Restoration Unitarian, Community of Hope, and Fellowship
Congregational Church. The $1 markup paid by these congregations
goes toward our Malawi scholarships.
Knitters
meet on the second Tuesday of each month at noon. We knit hats
for the newborn babies at St. John Hospital and have now been
asked by the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother (the religious
group that operates the hospital) to make white preemie hats and 12-inch
square blankets for the little ones that don't live so that they
can have something to be baptized in. We continue to sew the
squares for lap robes that member Elva Best prepares and then
she finishes them up for delivery to Resthaven Nursing Home. |
