What does community service look like?
You probably heard about the Cary Jaycees from the Cary Christmas Parade. For the past 42 years, we have organized, planned, and produced this event for the town. We partner with town officials, local businesses, and community leaders to provide a fun holiday experience for anyone who wants to attend. It’s our favorite holly, jolly way to kick off the Christmas season, and we love seeing thousands of people gathered around our historic town center to celebrate.
But the parade is just one of our community service projects.
Here are some of the other ways we’ve served our community in the past year:
Adopt-a-Highway - quarterly, we do a litter pickup on Old Apex Rd. Our members take a couple of hours on a weekend day to keep the town looking beautiful.
Ronald McDonald House - We put our culinary skills to the test and provided dinner for our local Ronald McDonald house. Yes, we cooked!
Music Bingo for a cause - At least once a year, we host a virtual music bingo where all proceeds go to another service organization. This year we worked with Safe Haven for Cats.
Wine Tasting - In support of local businesses we partner with a local winery to do a tasting. We love featuring local businesses in our projects and Chatham Hill Winery has been a tremendous partner. At our last event, we had a raffle of local prizes provided by other businesses and all proceeds went to Duke Cancer Research.
Green Thumbs and Garden Bums - We worked with a local nursery to teach people how to build their own herb gardens. Sustainability anyone?
Blanket Crafting - At our next group meeting we will be making blankets for residents of senior communities. We love our community members young and old and want to make sure they feel our warmth (literally).
Carter Finley Concessions - If you’ve ever been to an NC State football game at Carter Finley you’ve probably seen us. We are the ones in concession stand A slinging Chick-Fil-A sandwiches and drinks. We partner with other non-profits in the area to make this event happen. Each of our partners gets a donation from us for $100 per head plus tips, AND we make a generous contribution of our earnings to the NC Burn Center.
Read-a-thon - We’re working on a new project to benefit Read and Feed, a local group that teaches literacy to underserved communities while providing healthy meals to people in food deserts. In the fall you can read your heart out for a cause.
No matter what we do we try to keep the focus on our community. If we can highlight a local business, support others doing good work, or get our hands dirty and help we want to do it.
If you’re interested in any of these events, or have ideas of your own we’d love to hear them. Come to our next General Membership Meeting and hear what else we have cooking.