On Monday, January 16, the National Ministry Team and Unificationists around the nation bundled up and set out for a day of giving back to the community in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are their stories:

Contributed by Susan Bouachri

The AME Mt. Zion Church in Harlem recently celebrated it’s 90th birthday. The church building, which sponsors activity seven days a week, currently houses two church congregations as a neighboring church undertakes major renovation. Our director for the day, Donna, explained to us that Mt. Zion’s mission includes offering after-school care for pre-K and elementary school kids, a food pantry and a soup kitchen two days a week. The soup kitchen serves about 200 meals per week. The neighborhood has come to depend on this vital community gathering place, housed in a building which has seen better days!

Donna explained that the building we’d come to clean was originally opened in the early 1920’s as a bank. You could see remnants of its grand design in the marble staircase and detailed moulding around the vaulted ceiling. Two shifts of the National Ministry Team staff showed up with enthusiasm and elbow grease to clean and help the church prepare for their new year of feeding and churching others.

Kaye and Tal scrubbed pots and stovetops with steel wool for three hours in the afternoon, taking over from Olga and Jessica who scrubbed in the morning. Shizuko and I brought the marble stairway back to radiance with a thorough polishing. Riky and a volunteer from the UN named Sam mopped and cleaned following Sam’s paint job. Yasu cleaned the chapel and sanctuary, assisted by Alia who sorted through Bibles and hymnals to bring order back to dog-earred pages. As the tallest, Steve took responsibility to clean walls in the kitchen.

This was the second year that members of the National Ministry Team set out to invest in the community on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Dr. Ki Hoon Kim, Continental Director of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) North America, encouraged us to go out and make a difference, saying, “You don’t need to spend a lot of time creating your own project. Find someone who is already doing something and support them. Be sure to let them know who you are!” And that we did!

Contributed by Steve Honey

Five of us were schedule to help out Monday morning at the Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church at 116th Street and Madison in Harlem. We were schedule to help from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. We stayed ’til 1:00, which was great because we got to overlap with the second team of five that arrived at 1:00. The project was organized by “Hunger Free America.”

The church is very active. In addition to hosting two congregations (a Baptist church utilizes the facilities in the afternoon while their church is renovated), the church has a soup kitchen, a food pantry and a daycare program; so there’s a lot of activity everyday. 

Our job was to help with the annual deep cleaning. We scrubbed pots and pans, washed walls that had accumulated a year’s worth of grease from all the fried food prepared in the kitchen, wiped down pews in the sanctuary, cleaned tables, swept, mopped and vacuumed. The lady from the church was really grateful for the support and said that everything looked brighter when we finished, as though they had added more lighting.  The representative from Hunger Free America was appreciative as well and worked right along side us for both shifts. It felt great to give to the community.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service in Oakland, California is sponsored by Service for Peace and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Bill Richie, an Ambassador for Peace, and Markus von Euw, a local Unificationist, have promoted MLK Day as a day of service throughout Oakland and the East Bay for years, and have initiated many projects that are now taking place annually in various areas of the community. This day presents an opportunity for many schools to make a commitment to a year of service. The idea of completing “40 Days of Peace” also emerged from this initiative.   

Bay Area Family Church Boy Scout Troop 818 and many local Unificationist families participated for a fifth year of service on Martin Luther King Day at the Morcom Rose Garden. Joined by a hundred others, volunteers beautified the rose garden, pruning the roses, weeding, and fertilizing the gardens with elephant manure from the Oakland Zoo. Mayor Libby Schaaf came to address the volunteers at the morning kickoff of the MLK Day of Service and encouraged the youth to serve not only today but throughout the year. She credited her experiences volunteering as a child as a factor that helped her become mayor of Oakland today. In acknowledgment of the many years they have served at the rose garden, our Boy Scout Troop 818 were also specially recognized by the mayor and took pictures together with her.

Next Generation Academy (NGA) again sent 30 volunteers to support projects at three locations, where they made a great impression on the organizers through their enthusiastic spirit of serving.

Johannes van Galen instructed volunteers at the Life Academy of Health and Bio Science, a high school, on how to build benches that were needed for the school grounds.

Other Bay Area Family Church members supported the effort of Councilman Noel Gallo to beautify the community. Over the three-day weekend, more than 16 tons of garbage were collected and disposed.

The projects in Oakland are conducted in partnership with Oakland Public Works, Oakland Unified School District, Oakland City Council members, AmeriCorps, Civicorps, East Bay Regional Park District, Keep Oakland Beautiful, Friends of Sausal Creek, Urban Releaf, and many other community organizations.

This year, more than 1500 volunteers turned out to service sites at the Lakeside Park Gardens at Lake Merritt, the Morcom Rose Garden, the Fruitvale District, the Peralta Hacienda Park, Brookfield Elementary School, the Sobrante Park and the Oakland Animal Shelter. A tremendous amount of work was accomplished.

In the words of Coretta Scott King, “Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not only for celebration and remembrance, education and tribute, but above all a day of service … it is a day of volunteering to feed the hungry, rehabilitate housing, tutor those who can’t read, mentor at-risk youngsters, console the broken-hearted and a thousand other projects for building the beloved community of his dream.”

Contributed by Gary Hillier

Yesterday I went to the Pathseo Soup Kitchen, which is located at the Caldwell Temple of the AME Zion Church in the Bronx. It was about a 35-mile drive from home, but I got there in about 45 minutes as the traffic was very light because of the holiday. And I managed to get a street parking spot across the street from the building!

I entered through a side door to the basement of the building to find quite a number of people already there. It was not very organized, but I found a couple of people in charge and they told me that we would get started as soon as the leader of the event showed up.

There seemed to be around 50 to 100 people there, including a large group of young people wearing identical blue t-shirts. Americorps was one of the organizing groups but there appeared to be a number of groups and individuals from various locations in the Bronx and other New York City locations as well.

The project for the day was to clean up and reorganize the food and other items stored in the basement location of the soup kitchen. We began the day by forming a circle and getting an introduction to the purpose of the day and being informed that there are approximately 1.6 million residents of New York City who experience food insecurity (not enough food for 3 meals per day). Part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech was then read, and we formed teams and began our various projects, including cleaning, reorganizing, and building shelving to help the organization.

It was just a few hours of hard work, but it was fun, and there was a wonderful spirit of people of all ages and races working together to aid a worthy cause. It was fun talking to new people and hearing about their lives, their struggles, and their various occupations and hobbies. Most of all it was a great experience that I would like every day to be like—people working together without regard to our differences. Just like one family under God!

Contributed by EJ Rapada

This is the second year that my family and I volunteered at the Kinard Family Helping Hands in Newark, New Jersey, and it is both fulfilling and inspiring to see the happy faces of the people who received hot meals and winter clothes. This year is more special because we brought a friend who donated boxes of donuts. She was so excited to be a part of the project and promised to bring more next time. The experience was a testament to the fact that there is genuine joy in giving. As Mother Teresa said, “If we can’t feed or clothe a hundred people, then just feed and clothe one.”

Did you or your community serve on Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Share the story of your efforts or activities at familyfed.org/share-a-story.