Ticker

Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Emmanuel Onyenyili Cleaning supplies in hand, Ticker staff puts in a hard day's work.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is noted for granting students across the nation a day off from school. But for those at the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, each year Martin Luther King Jr. Day is "a day on, not a day off."

For the past five years, the NYCCAH has been honoring Dr. King through their annual Serve-a-Thon, a three-day long program which unifies churches and soup kitchens city-wide with eager and committed volunteers.

Each year, the NYCCAH coordinates volunteers to help soup kitchens and food pantries with painting, cleaning, serving food, packing pantry bags and distributing information about food stamps, according to their website.

Neal Flowerman, the organization's coordinator of volunteer services, said that the annual Serve-a-Thon helps these soup kitchens and food pantries complete "projects that they normally put on a backburner" due to lacks of time, money or volunteers."

In response to the city's growing need for volunteers, this year's fifth annual Serve-a-Thon produced the biggest volunteer turnout yet. "We boosted the number of people that served last year from about 100 to 150 to 350 people who served this year," he explained.

Flowerman further added how the coalition does not refer to those who donate their time as being volunteers and for good reason.

"We call them servers instead of volunteers because they serve. Dr. King's legacy was to serve," he said. "Anybody can be good, because anybody can serve, that was his motto and his fighting force."

This year, servers helped raise more than $4,500 that went towards buying Serve-a-Thon necessities such as food, renovation supplies, and paint. But he noted another kind of donation that was equally as valuable. "Sherwin-Williams Company donated 300 gallons of paint for the churches, soup kitchen and food pantries to use."

Other servers in attendance this year included 12 staff members of Baruch's very own Ticker. Members of The Ticker volunteered nine hours of their Saturday in late January at Abounding Grace Ministries located in the Lower West Side.

With the help of the church's employees, the day was filled with folding bags of donated clothing, washing dishes in the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom from floor to ceiling and scrubbing and dusting the common area.

Continued...

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