Creating an event that became a community effort...My Experience with a Personal Project
Throughout the last few years I have been the director for the Lander Community Christmas Dinners. It is a meal on Christmas Day that is offered to everyone who wants to attend, free of charge.
My senior year of high school in winter of 2016, I decided our community of Fremont County needed a meal to bring folks together during the holidays, not just for those in need financially.
Moving from a small town in Oklahoma, my mom and I always helped serve food on Christmas and Thanksgiving with a similar concept. I decided to try to recreate and improve the dinner in Lander.
I wanted to focus on making the dinner as nice as possible. I contacted multiple restaurants and grocery stores, suddenly other organizations started reaching out to me to help donate services and monetary donations.
I was able to use the Lander Valley High School commons as well as their cafeteria area to serve and cook all the food Christmas Day.
As a high school student, and a young adult, I had no idea what I was getting myself into but I had one goal; to feed as many people as possible, find as many people who would be spending the holiday alone and ensure they have company.
The outpouring I got of volunteers was so large on Christmas Day that there were a few times I was dumbfounded and stood around just looking at all the eager people standing around waiting to help.
At the end of the day, we had around 80 volunteers, serving food, delivering food to home bound members, cleaning and making sure the event ran smoothly. The event was very successful with more than 250 people being served the first year and around 300 people being served the second year.
In some ways this was a solo project, I came up with the idea on my own, went to businesses but in no way could I have done this massive project without the businesses and people who helped support the idea.
Without the support of the community and being able to bounce ideas off key players such as Mark Calhoun, this event wouldn't have been as successful. Mark encouraged me and led me to others who had similar hopes of helping. Without people like Mark, this dinner never would have happened.
My solo project turned into a community project and the credit goes to every person who supported my ideas.
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by Annabeth Babcock