From the Director’s Chair November 2019

Christmas is upon us!!  Once again the door went up at 5:00 A.M. on October 5, 2019 and there were four mothers waiting to sign up their children for Christmas gifts. And so it begins! We will be taking names every Saturday until the first Saturday of December. We are also taking names for five Sundays starting October 13, 2019.  Needless to say, we need your help getting this work done.

You should all have received your invitation to our 40th Anniversary Celebration on October 26, 2019. We hope you have a chance to join us for a very busy day stating with Mass, then lunch, a few speakers and a bunch of awards and a coffee and a mingling session to close the day.

We are constantly updating our web page. Jeff has added a number of new pages concerning volunteer opportunities. Take a look, just go to our web site www.urbanmissionaries.com and click on the Careers button. There you will see all of the current opportunities that we need to fill so that this ministry to “the least, the last, and the left out” can continue to grow. If you yourself cannot help us, maybe you know someone who might be able to fill a position because they are retired or have some extra energy and have the heart for this kind of work. Think about it, who knows who may pop into your mind!

Once again, I want to tell you about our volunteers from Young Neighbors in Action. First of all, each of these groups did a fantastic job at whatever tasks we asked them to do. Here are some of the tasks they took on:  bottles and cans redemption, cut brush along our fence line, found someone living under the bridge which abuts our property, mowed the lawn, swept the parking lot, took turns working the counter in the store, hung clothing, and sorted incoming boxes stored in the shed. Yup, they were busy as bees!!!

We got ready for Christmas by clearing everything out of the shed and putting it into basement storage for the winter so we can start setting up the shed to receive all those family bags of toys. There will be some 1,200 bags and they take up every square inch of space in the shed. This sounds so simple, but let me assure you that it took us four hours with ten young men to get the job done. In fact, we still have a lot of yard sale stuff to hang on for next year’s flea market.