Kali Lawrence, executive director of Springfield Promise Neighborhood, said three groups of volunteers came through to help with building the community garden. She called the work “extremely valuable.”
“This would have taken us weeks to get this project done by ourselves. We’ve got a coordinating team of about five or six and to have this kind of manpower, even for a couple of hours, we can knock a lot of it out. What would have otherwise taken us weeks, and or a month, with a few people helping today we are getting a lot done,” Lawrence said.
Kelly Taylor works at Clark Schaefer Hackett, which is in the Bushnell building in downtown Springfield. She chose downtown clean-up as her act of service to keep the area around where she works “beautiful.”
“We can help give back to the community we live and work in,” Taylor said. “It’s all about making our community beautiful.”
Chad Schell agreed with Taylor and said he volunteered for the day because it made him feel good to help the community.
“Coming out and helping, doing whatever we can, it feels good,” Schell said.
Clark County Service Day is a community partnership between the City of Springfield, Clark County, United Way of Clark, Champaign & Madison Counties, Keep Clark County Beautiful, Mercy Health, Community Health Foundation, Clark State Community College, The Greater Springfield Partnership, The Nehemiah Foundation, Emmanuel Christian Academy, Catholic Central School, and Clark County Combined Health District.
About 250 people signed up in advance to work on projects.
The annual cleanup day was originally started by Catholic Central in 2001 and then turned into a county-wide service day in 2016. The event was canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Gina Roth, a senior at Catholic Central High School, said her mother was one of the people that started the original service. Now she has taken up the volunteering torch.
“I became a service team leader as soon as I could and it’s just something that I love doing. It makes me feel good. It’s just really important to help the community that I live in. I guess I got that from my mom,” Roth said.
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