Home Economy Volunteers come to MLK Center’s rescue

Volunteers come to MLK Center’s rescue

By

Jacquelyn Voghel

-

12/23/2022

SETTING UP: Rachel Lawler, a volunteer at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Newport, organizes toys for the organization’s “Santa’s Workshop” program, which allows families to choose from a selection of free gifts for their children. PBN PHOTO/DAVID HANSEN

While the holiday season is always a busy time for the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Newport, this year the spike in activity goes back to August and has continued each month, Executive Director Heather Strout says. Now that’s compounded by an intensified version of the typical holiday rush. A well-used program that

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While the holiday season is always a busy time for the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Newport, this year the spike in activity goes back to August and has continued each month, Executive Director Heather Strout says. Now that’s compounded by an intensified version of the typical holiday rush. A well-used program that provides families with gift cards to buy Thanksgiving meals – which the center ran as a meal distribution program prior to the pandemic – saw more than a 21% increase in interest in people served in the days leading up to the holiday. The shift from meal delivery to gift cards stems in part from this increased demand, Strout says. “We just didn’t have the freezer capacity this year,” she said. Demand for the MLK Community Center’s services is quickly outgrowing the size of its physical location in general. To keep up, the center is currently undergoing an expansion of its building, which will double the size of its food pantry and significantly increase storage space. In November, the MLK Community Center was already seeing an increase in demand for its Christmas programming. The nonprofit’s “Santa’s Workshop” program, which allows families to choose from a selection of free gifts for their children, had more than 1,000 children registered more than a week before Christmas. In total, this program provided gifts for 916 children in 2021. “We’re not even close to being done with those registrations,” Strout said. “We’re far ahead of where our registrations were last year, as far as numbers go.” And while it’s hard to quantify the decrease, Strout says, the center takes another hit from its contributors’ financial stressors. “We’re also seeing decreases in donations,” Strout said. “When the market’s good, donations are good,” she added, “and when the market’s bad, we definitely see it and feel it.” While financial donations are down, a strong base of volunteers has helped to keep operations running. Volunteers logged more than 17,000 hours last year, and the MLK Community Center expects to meet or exceed this annual figure by the end of the month. “A lot of times, when people financially start to feel a pinch, they see it around them and want to help in a different way,” Strout said.