Helping Young Moms and Their Children {Service Hours for Kids}

Rachel is working towards earning the President's Volunteer Service Award so she is earning a lot of service hours this year.  We are always looking for ways for her to serve in the community.  Our church, Valley Creek, has created the Next Steps Center to partner with organizations and schools in the community to see how they can best serve the people in our area.

The Next Steps Center has reached out to a local Young Life group and found a way to make an impact in the lives of young moms and their children.  The Next Steps Center and Young Life bring about 50 young moms together for dinner and support at the center twice a month.  These moms range in age from 11 to 23 years old.  The Next Steps Center is also creating a Baby Needs store where the Young Life moms can shop for maternity items, baby clothes, big kid clothes, etc.  There are some new items but most of the items are gently used and offered to the moms for free.


The store is rather new.  This is a cute shot of the shopping area.  But they have received tons of bags and boxes of donated items that were just piled up in a spare room off to the side.  So Rachel and two of her friends from American Heritage Girls signed up to help sort the items.


They first sorted the items into 4 categories - girls winter, girls summer, boys winter, and boys summer.  Once that part was done, they went back through and sorted each category into sizes such as girls winter age 0-6 months, girls winter age 9-24 months, etc.


We were there for four hours but in the end the storage room looked so nice and organized!  Rachel felt good knowing that she helped to make this happen.


This experience was great for me too and I plan to reach out to see how I can help serve the Young Life moms on a regular basis when they come to the Next Steps Center.  What amazing things can happen when two great organizations like these come together to be the hands and feet of Jesus!

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