Community Care | Generosity Story

Westsiders have an incredibly generous heart.

It is so beautiful.

When COVID-19 hit and things began to shut down, we knew that there would be people who really needed help.

Maybe lost a job or just whatever.

And so it's been just a joy to see Westsiders stand up and say, hey, I want to help, what can I do.

We live in a county where a lot of people still have jobs, and around the church, and we just knew people wanted to help.

In fact, that's probably the biggest question that came up is how can we help?

Westsiders asking that.

And so we thought, well, there are families who need it.

Let's offer people an opportunity to serve those in need.

We found that we had a gap in our ability to just meet really basic and immediate needs without creating a bottleneck.

And so we just wanted to have a dedicated place that anyone could go to post a need or meet a need, knowing that immediately anyone could respond to that and be the church.

So it really was just a place to try to be the hands and feet of Jesus right now.

We have a grandparent who has adopted her grandchildren, and the technology that they have in their home wasn't as current as it needed to be to support the school Zoom calls and that sort of thing.

So we were able to put that need out on the Facebook group and have it met within a few days.

Another need we had was a family that needed a bike for one of the kids they care for.

And it was really cool to watch this need get met.

So they put it on the web page, and the next day there was a bike ready for everyone to go riding.

And it was just such a blessing to our family and to our kids.

They had the best day just going riding and it just meant a lot to our family.

We've hosted two bloods drive now with the American Red Cross.

And the interesting thing there is they called us because the places that were hosing the drives were all closed and they had to find a new alternative.

And we were able to open our building and say, yeah, come on in, we'll be glad to host you.

They've been really grateful about that.

And then probably the third way is the resource drives.

The resource drives are just specifically a response to the needs of our ongoing community partners, school partners, and foster and adoption partners.

During a pandemic isn't when you step back.

It's when you step in and when you lean in and offer even greater help to the people that you're committed to supporting.

We were able to call six different foster care agencies and say who are your five to ten families that this going to hit the hardest.

We were able to pull the items from the resource drive that we had and then we had different volunteers all over Westside who would go and do a porch dropoff for those families.

There are just so many ways Westsiders have stood up and met the need during this crisis.

It's just amazing.

I'm never really surprised by Westsiders.

They always tend to jump in when there's a need like this.

They look for opportunities to jump in and to help and to be a blessing to the community.

And the beauty of what we're called to do as believers is that like we might not always know why or what the impact is.

You know, it's interesting.

I think at the end of this, the story of this time won't so much be the social distancing, but it will be the way people came together to support each other.

And I just wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for what you do.

Thank you for always showing up.

Thank you for being available to meet the needs in the community.

You're touching so many lives during this dark time, really bringing light to our community.

Thank you so much for leaning in when it would be really easy to lean out.

Even though we're apart, it feels like we've been together.