Showing posts with label job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label job. Show all posts

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Giving Hearts of Project Change

A beautiful thank you from our Director of Facilities, Robert Ontman, to the Awaken KC team of Project Change.

"I just wanted to share my personal gratitude and appreciation. In my many years of working with charities, churches, and volunteer groups, I have never seen such a well planned and committed effort. The team has taken the worst and roughest areas of our facility and transformed them into beautiful sanctuaries that will serve our families for years to come.

They took a dark and dismal basement with a ruined floor and completely redid the floor, walls, décor- everything at considerable time and expense. It has been masterfully crafted into our teen center and is now in use to prepare our teens for a better future as they learn job skills, work ethics, spiritual growth classes, financial management and many other life skills classes that will break their cycle of poverty.

Their other project took a muddy field and created a vibrant rain garden complete with decorative stone walk way, drainage away from our buildings that were getting flooded, and a rain garden too peaceful to describe. All of this tells our beleaguered and down-trodden families that they are loved and that there is hope- without which they can never even attempt recovery back out of homelessness.

The Awaken K.C. team took the biggest group of volunteers that I have ever seen from every walk of life and from diverse jobs and organized them into a well prepared, hard working, cohesive unit. They even smiled all the way through and enjoyed their work. They enjoyed each other and the task at hand. They literally worked through snow storms and rain storms- excelling through every challenge that emerged.

I cannot think of a more dedicated or thorough group that I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Many thanks to Kate Wind, Randy Huber, Michael Hurd, Tim Parks, Patty Kruger, Melody Meek, Kelly with A L Huber, SFS Architects, Western Fireproofing, Lafarge Cement, Wallace Engineering, the gardening companies and so many more. You all have gone well beyond anything that we could have hoped or dreamed for. Please come again."

-Laura Gray

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Hope

Driving to work one day last week, I was mulling over all of the people whose lives have been changed by the current economy - by being downsized, laid off, or just plain let go. The resemblance to what has happened to so many of our residents felt very vivid to me.

When you lose something like a job, hope is central to whether you despair over the future or believe that things will get better.

It's apparently the same for the economy. Hope is vital to our ability to recover.

Fortunately, as economic hope returns, businesses will recover and most people who have lost their jobs will find other ones. Their lives will be restored.

It strikes me that Community LINC is a microcosm of what happens at the poorest end of the economy all of the time. Our families have lost a lot. They have lost not just their jobs, but their homes, and, because they were homeless, sometimes even their children. Faith and hope are necessary. We need them both to recover from loss and rebuild lives.

-Laura Gray, March 29, 2009