Volunteer to honor King by serving others

Kentucky.com

January 20, 2008

Come Monday, many of us will observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day by taking time off from work or school, doing a few chores around the house, maybe going to a sale and otherwise just kicking back.

Sometime during the day, we might spend a moment or two pondering King's legacy.

But this year, some groups are urging Kentuckians to honor King's memory in a more active and direct way: by volunteering to do something to help out their neighbors. Some areas of the country have been promoting Martin Luther King Day as a national day of service for years, but this is the first time the idea is being widely promoted around Central Kentucky.

In the Lexington area, planners have lined up about a dozen projects in which people can volunteer to serve on Monday -- from doing neighborhood cleanups to painting walls at the Hope Center, to helping build a food storage area at an animal shelter at Salvisa in Mercer County.

Similar programs also are planned Monday in Louisville, Bowling Green, Covington, Morehead, Fort Mitchell and several other cities across Kentucky, according to a national Web site listing MLK Service Day activities.

'We expect that the numbers of volunteers probably will be small this year,' said Karen Anderson, a member of the committee that is planning MLK Day volunteer opportunities in Lexington. 'But Philadelphia started with 1,000 people volunteering a few years ago, and now they're up to 50,000. If we can just get folks to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a 'day on' for our community, rather than a 'day off,' then we will have accomplished a lot.'

The idea of Martin Luther King Day as an opportunity to do volunteer work for one's community is not new.

Congress in 1994 passed the King Holiday and Service Act, which officially designated the King holiday as a national day of volunteer service. All Americans were encouraged to celebrate King's work and memory by doing things to help their neighbors, rather than simply enjoying a day away from work. Participation has grown steadily over the past decade or so, and now hundreds of thousands of people observe the day each year by volunteering to tutor kids, deliver meals to shut-ins, build homes or spruce up facilities that serve the needy.

In Lexington, the centerpiece of public observances on Monday will be the annual Martin Luther King Holiday March in downtown Lexington, which will begin at 10 a.m. in front of Heritage Hall.

'Lexington does a great job of commemorating Dr. King with the march and all the other activities,' said Melissa Newton, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Commission on Community Volunteerism and Service. 'But we would like to add the day of service idea as another component of that, giving people another way to honor Dr. King's work and memory. We decided we were going to focus on service, since the original act was the King Holiday and Service Act.'

Newton said she and other coordinators are trying to plan volunteer opportunities to perform useful services that wouldn't involve large investments of time.

'The idea is for short service projects, a couple of hours on one day, and not a long-term commitment,' she said. 'The idea is that, hopefully, people will get the volunteer bug, realize how great it is to do something for others and experience the satisfaction of volunteering. Then, maybe they'll continue to do it throughout the year.'

Newton and Anderson say there are plenty of opportunities left to volunteer on Monday.

You can find a list of volunteer projects around Lexington, and sign up for any that interest you, by going to www.volunteersolutions.org/uwbg.

'All of the projects can still use volunteers, and people can sign up on line all the way until Sunday night,' Newton said.

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