Wanted: Volunteers and Crew Leaders for Nuestra Casa Work Days

Are you looking for a team-building activity? Need something to do on a Saturday that helps your community? Itching to put your construction skills to use? If you like to get involved in building projects, we’re looking for volunteers and crew leaders throughout the spring and summer.

The Nuestra Casa neighborhood center renovation project is underway. With about half the funding goal achieved so far, we’re ready to move forward with some key phases of construction. And we’re looking for help! As a collaborating partner on the project, Women’s Service Day is coordinating work days. But that doesn’t mean we’re only asking women to help. We’d love participation from both men and women for monthly work days this spring and summer. Timing will likely be about one Saturday a month, starting in late March. You’re welcome to commit to just one or several work days.

Volunteers
If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you. Please tell us a little about your skill set and availability using our online form. Once we’ve determined our volunteer pool, we’ll be in touch to make plans.

Crew Leaders
You can recruit your own crews or rely on the Women’s Service Day team to coordinate a team for you. Either way, please use our online form to sign up.

We’re looking for leaders who can:

• Manage projects and people
• Read architectural plans and converse in construction terms with builders
• Act as liaison between builders and the volunteers
• Implement construction plans with appropriate skills
• Gather supplies and equipment needed for the day if not provided
• Clearly communicate (with patience) to crews of volunteers
• Handle any emergencies that may arise

NOTE: Due to budget constraints (because we’re still in the fundraising phase), the project may experience stops and starts. We can only spend what we have banked!

Questions? E-mail the Women’s Service Day Planning Committee.

Food for Funds: Help Support Nuestra Casa by Shopping with Tastefully Simple

Everyone loves food! Especially easy-to-prepare, gourmet food from Tastefully Simple that you can buy online. What could be simpler?

Now you can combine shopping for these delicious products with supporting a community project. Amy Martell is a local consultant for Tastefully Simple who is donating a percentage of her profits from this sale, which ends March 17. If her sales exceed $1,000 she will donate 50-75% of her profits to the Nuestra Casa neighborhood center project, which is under renovation to become a community gathering place in the Westcore neighborhood of Holland. Women’s Service Day is continuing our fundraising efforts for Nuestra Casa by coordinating this shopping event.

Here’s how it works:

1. Place your order online by going to this website: http://www.tastefullysimple.com/web/amartell1
2. Have fun shopping. From main dishes to desserts, Tastefully Simple offers a wide variety of easy-to-prepare foods and gifts for every day and every occasion.
3. When you’re ready to check out, click on “Find Host/Event” and then enter: First Name: Nuestra Last Name: Casa
4. Pay for your order. There is NO sales tax on food items—only non-food items.
5. Complete your shipping information.
6. Watch for your delivery!

All of your products will be shipped directly to you by March 29. How easy is that? Remember, all orders are due Sunday, March 17.

And, Amy will offer an additional $2.00 donation for every party booked and held by June 1, 2013.

Invite your friends! We’ve created a Facebook event page to make it easy for you.

For questions about Tastefully Simple, please contact Amy Martell at (231) 730.0066 or QueenMartell@aol.com.

To learn more about the Nuestra Casa neighborhood center, please visit the Nuestra Casa blog.

Thank you for your continued support in building community!

Nuestra Casa: A Year-End Giving Opportunity

Thanks to many volunteers this year, we’ve continued to make great strides in creating “pride of place” in the City of Holland to prepare the Nuestra Casa neighborhood center for renovation.

Participants on Women’s Service Day raised a whopping $2,400 this year, and many people in Westcore neighborhood and our community contributed to other fundraisers, including a car wash and a holiday shopping event. Between these events and the numerous grants and donations received, the project has reached nearly half of its funding.

Much work has happened this year to prepare the building for construction:

• An architect completed detailed plans, pro bono, and has received city approval
• We’ve completed deconstruction and clean-up so the building shell is ready for work
• We’ve assembled all the requirements for the building permit application
• The garage has been structurally shored up so it’s ready to be our staging area for materials
• We’ve obtained a structural review so we know exactly what needs to happen
• We reconnected the structure to the city water supply

And, the Westcore Neighbors organization has established a Board and applied for 501c3 status.

It’s exciting to see the progress for making this neighborhood center dream come true!

Won’t you consider a donation toward neighborhood revitalization this year? It’s easy to do. You can simply write a check to Good Samaritan Ministries, the project’s fiduciary agent, with “Nuestra Casa” in the memo line and send it to:

Good Samaritan Ministries
513 East 8th Street
Suite 25
Holland, MI 49423

Or, you can make an online donation through our website.

We appreciate any contribution you can make!

Thank you, and happy holidays!

The Women’s Service Day Organizing Committee
Waltraud Beckmann, Marcia Davis, Cindy DeGraaf, Sue Gadbois, Lois Maassen, Cheryl Murdoch, Carrie Ypma

A Successful Shopping Event

Thanks to everyone—shoppers and vendors—who came out to our shopping event fundraiser for Nuestra Casa neighborhood center this fall. We raised more than $800, which will go toward renovation of Nuestra Casa.

We also appreciate CityFlatsHotel for providing a lovely space to hold the event. And thanks to Herman Miller, Inc. for donating an Aeron chair for our raffle.

It was a fun event in a great location for a worthy cause!

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Honoring One of Our Own

For eleven years, seven women have banded together as the Women’s Service Day planning team to help build awareness about the needs for women and children in the Holland/Zeeland community. But all good things must come to an end at some point.

We are honored to have served our community with our friend, Waltraud Beckmann, who has recently taken the position of Organizer Emeritus so she can spend more time with her family and focus her energy on other volunteer interests and hobbies.

If you’ve participated in Women’s Service Day, you may have worked alongside Waltraud on a crew and witnessed her tireless energy and enthusiasm for getting work done. Each year she has been the leader behind our donation drive, helping direct volunteers to organize their contributions, then managing the distribution process to deliver goods to the recipient of our day’s donations.

A researcher and innovator at heart, we’ve always appreciated her fresh insights and zeal for creativity in the planning process of each event.

Although we know she’s not leaving our community, we will miss having her join our planning team meetings. Thank you, Waltraud, for your years of service to our team, our event, and our community!

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Shop for Nuestra Casa at CityFlats Hotel

Last year’s shopping event for Nuestra Casa

Women’s Service Day is continuing our fundraising efforts for Nuestra Casa neighborhood center in Westcore neighborhood by hosting a holiday shopping event on Thursday, November 8, from 5 to 8 p.m.

That’s when a number of independent purveyors selling jewelry, housewares, food, and more will showcase their products in one venue, making it easy for you to shop. Come to the CityFlats Hotel, stop by the CitySēn lounge for happy hour drinks, then move down the hall to the conference room west of the registration desk for the fundraiser. Shop til you drop, then enjoy hand-rolled sushi, sake, and live music at Sushi Night back in the CitySēn lounge until 10 p.m. Bring your friends!

We’ve created a Facebook event page (which means it’s easy to invite your friends!). You can also download a poster (4.4 MB PDF) to promote the event in your workplace, church, book group, knitting club, etc.

Here are some of the purveyors you can expect:

• BeautiControl
• Kibler’s Kreations
• KoKoon
• Lia Sophia
• Mary Kay
• Mother Tongues
• Pampered Chef
• Silpada
• Tastefully Simple
• Thirty-One Gifts

The holidays are around the corner. This event is a great opportunity to give, and in multiple ways: to your loved ones and in support of a renovation that will help create pride of place in the City of Holland!

Women’s Service Day 2012: Giving Beyond Expectations

Did you know Ottawa County is the most generous county in Michigan? It’s no surprise when you see what got accomplished by more than 125 volunteers on Women’s Service Day this year.

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Crews helped eleven nonprofit organizations in the Holland/Zeeland community, raised $2,500 for Nuestra Casa neighborhood center through our silent auction/raffle and pig-in-blankets fundraisers, donated at least  two months’ worth of diapers for the Breakfast with Baby program, and helped build awareness about the needs for women and children in our community.

Assignments included a number of tasks, such as:

• Preparing curriculum for the Girls on the Run program
• Outdoor yard work and clean-up
• General organization and cleaning
• Pre-assembly of walls for an upcoming Habitat for Humanity build
• Harvesting and garden shut-down at the Holland Community Garden
• Painting
• Cleaning and organizing toys at the Holland Rescue Mission’s Stepping Stones Day Care and Family Hope Ministry Center
• Washing windows
• Stocking the freezer with prepared meals at My Sister’s House 2
• Packaging 5,124 diapers for distribution by Nestlings Diaper Bank through nonprofits to mothers in need
• Organizing inventory and displays for Rick Rack
• Helping Westcore Neighbors with home improvement tasks, including setting up a garage sale for a neighbor with cancer

We know our volunteers made a difference, because of the feedback we’ve received from the agencies served. Here are expressions of gratitude from a few of the nonprofits we helped:

“We simply could not operate without the generosity of volunteers such as those that served here this week. Although some of the tasks may not have seemed important, please keep in mind that all of the time you put in allows us to spend more time serving those in need. No duty is too small and no volunteer is unappreciated.” - Community Action House

“Thanks again to Women’s Service Day for being such a blessing to our organization!” - Nestlings Diaper Bank

“We had a fantastic group of volunteers from Women’s Service Day working inside and outside our building yesterday. Our volunteers exceeded our expectations and we got so many tasks taken care of and off our list. Thank you so much for this opportunity and your group’s continued support!” – Center for Women in Transition

“Thanks to you for organizing the service day and thanks also to the ladies who helped at the garden. It was hard work and perhaps not that much fun, at least not your typical gardening. But the work was important, things we seldom have time to do. So please come back, either as individuals or collectively on any workday.” – Holland Community Garden

You can read more about the day in this article by The Holland Sentinel. It’s wonderful to live in a place where generosity abounds. Thanks again to all our volunteers who helped make Women’s Service Day 2012 a success!