Parkwood Fall Festival
By Brent Adams | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
One of the key strategies of Southeast Christian Church is to serve the community by going to them in the name of Jesus.
This was demonstrated in Southern Indiana on Friday, Oct. 21, when more than 120 volunteers from the church’s Indiana Campus helped staff the Fall Festival at Parkwood Elementary School in Clarksville.
Volunteers manned game booths, oversaw craft tables, painted faces and handed out food and soft drinks to the more than 400 people who attended the event.
“Everything was fantastic,” said Parkwood principal, Janice Korfhage, who was thanked by numerous appreciative students as she walked about the school’s
gymnasium. “The children had a wonderful time. It was well-organized, and a lot of the staff members were overwhelmed with how well things went.”
One of the students who attended the festival, Cortaveous Gray, 9, said he was impressed with all the festival had to offer. He took some time from playing games
and getting his face painted to decorate a picture frame.
“I’m glad I came,” Gray said. “I had the most fun playing games.”
The night also was rewarding for those who volunteered.
Dee Dee McCarty, a retired teacher, said she felt back in her element when she interacted with the kids who stopped by her soccer booth in the gymnasium.
“I love the little things like just seeing them smile and helping them tie their shoes,” McCarty said. She was one of nine people from a Southern Indiana home
group who took the night off from their Bible study to serve.
“This was such a nice event, and it is great because it didn’t cost a lot, but it meant a lot,” McCarty said. “I wish they would have had this around when my kids were
little. I was a single mother with four children. They would have loved something like this.”
Zachary Leonard, 10, had strands of cotton candy in his hair and on his clothes as he passed out sticks of the fluffy confection to attendees. As he served with
friends, Nathan Babcock and Cody Spaits, the smile rarely left his face.
“It makes it easier to do community work when you can have fun and do it with your friends,” Leonard said. “I really enjoy doing it. I would love to come back again next year.”
Although plans for a follow-up event next year have not been decided, Korfhage said that based on the success of this year’s event, it is likely that there will be a Fall Festival at the school in 2012.
“When you start a new initiative you just never know how it’s going to turn out,” Korfhage said. “But I think there’s room for this to grow.”
But the fledgling partnership with Parkwood is bigger than an annual event, said Janet Warren, a ministry liaison in the Local Missions Ministry at Southeast.
Southeast will partner with Parkwood to provide volunteers for a reading program.
Church volunteers also will serve as tutors for before-school and after-school homework help, and women will participate in a Hispanic mothers group, which
helps immigrants who settle in the Parkwood neighborhood become acclimated to the area. Southeast families also will participate with Parkwood students and
their families in service projects at the school, which is located near the bustling Veterans Parkway corridor.
“We want to build community,” Warren said. “We are looking to this partnership to be our test model for how we can connect with neighborhood schools.”