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For several years we have had a city wide Make a Difference Day committee to publicize and support the program. This year we completely lost control and we are very proud of that. As momentum built we realized that people were “doing their own thing” without reference to committee organization or coordination. We realized then that we had achieved our long term goal of creating a continuing tradition that would continue without committee involvement. We, as a city, had gone back to basics. We spent the day helping others without fanfare as we celebrated a national day of helping others. We were able to track and coordinate a least a dozen projects. We provided a breakfast snack as we assembled at the library, took drinks to the worksites at midmorning, and at lunchtime provided a full meal to volunteers. This last was served at and by a historically black church, making this one of the largest biracial events in the history of the community. One new event for us was collection of children’s book in coordination with the Books From the Heart organization to place books in the hands of low income families who own none. We collected over 1,000 high quality books!
Kids who will now learn to read at home and have a park to visits exemplify the long term impact we have created in our town. We believe the attached pictures and clippings depict our total effort but we would be happy to furnish detail if needed. Note that our initial effort in 1996 was a prizewinner. Never doubt that your incentives worked for us and will work for others. No matter what the result this year we are delighted that our community participates and we will continue to invest ourselves in this program.
Make a Difference Day is observed on the fourth Saturday in October.
On the following are many more pictures showing the activities of over 200 participants. (Our apologies to those whose activities were omitted. Your work was well appreciated, but some photos did not turn out as expected.) |
From
a beginning in one Sunday School class, the citizens of Ozark
embraced Make a Difference Day as a way to work together to improve the
community. In 1996, a class from Ozark First United Methodist
Church Sunday School answered the call from USA Today's Weekend
Magazine, distributed by The Dothan Eagle, to join a national
day of service that has grown to be the nation's most active day of
volunteering.
The
diversity of our efforts was highlighted too by a seasonal phenomena —
cleaning up after a hurricane. A small, little used park was a mass of
broken and uprooted trees when we began. Now it is functional and the
wood has been sold and the proceeds donated to our continuing Make a
Difference Day Fund!
Key
players in the October 23, 2004, workday were
Everyone
met at the library for coffee and went on to the tasks at hand.
Completed Make a Difference Day projects (and some ongoing) were: