National Day of Service honors King’s legacy in reaching for ‘the beloved community’

Dalton Goser was folding blankets and clothes for disadvantaged children when a chilling feeling swept over him.

It came during his first experience with the National Day of Service on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday a year ago.

We are all fragile.

The sophomore at Rockhurst University in Kansas City was spending the day in service along with many other Rockhurst students and staff — amid the thousands of other people who volunteered from many groups at hundreds of sites across the area.

The university purposefully set up service opportunities to work together with people in need of those services.

Goser was folding and sorting the blankets and clothes with families and children. Goser knew he’d been lucky, able to get some financial aid, to get a chance at college. He felt a closeness serving “with” these families rather than just “for” them.

“I felt privileged,” he said.

As another Day of Service comes, it is a chance for everyone, he said, “to reflect on how blessed we are.”

The idea of a national day of service emerged as a way to deepen the nation’s observance of King.

It wasn’t until 1983, after years of sometimes contentious debate, that Congress established the third Monday of each year as a federal holiday to mark King’s birthday.

In 1994, a little more than a decade after Congress established a federal holiday in honor of King, it took the next step to designate the holiday as a national day of service and charged the Corporation for National and Community Service to help drive the effort.

“A day on,” the CNCS called it, “not a day off.”

To Alyssa Kozak, the day is a chance to realize King’s dream of a “beloved community.”

That was the theme a year ago when some 250 community volunteers joined the team of City Year AmeriCorps members in painting 27 murals to beautify Kansas City Public Schools’ Central Academy of Excellence.

The volunteers included some 60 students, Kozak said. They saw first-hand the transformation of the school, and then joined with their classmates when the school resumed the following day.

The murals, telling the stories of champions of civil rights, delighted students who were taking pictures of themselves and each other in front of the art.

The volunteers — City Year’s young service members, neighbors and the students — felt what it was like “to give to something greater than themselves,” said Kozak, a development associate for City Year.

City Year, which recruits young adults to spend two years working in schools with students and teachers as mentors and tutors, is organizing another day of service, this time at Kansas City’s Northeast High School.

They are anticipating more than 300 volunteers this time, City Year team leader Laura Martinez said.

It thrilled her a year ago to see so many different people and businesses join in support of the effort — a spirit that she says is catching on even more the second time around, which is exciting for the partnering Kansas City Public Schools, she said.

“The principal is over the moon about this,” she said.

The day becomes particularly special when families join in and the work crosses generations, said Tiffany Bartley, program director of Kansas City’s Youth Volunteer Corps.

The Youth Volunteer Corps, best known for engaging hundreds of youth in summer service projects, has been rallying its troops on MLK Day for many years.

They coordinate the work with its hosting agency, the Greater Kansas City YMCA, making it a day for families to serve together.

Indoor programs at area YMCAs are putting together birthday bags — a collection of gifts that volunteers will be distributing to children on their birthdays throughout the year who might not otherwise be able to receive presents.

The Youth Volunteer Corps is also teaming with the Heartland Conservation Alliance for an outdoor exercise-oriented service activity picking up trash along area trails and parks.

The way the day mixes older children with younger children in service is most gratifying, Bartley said.

“Seeing the little ones’ excitement as they contribute to someone else is exciting,” she said. “The older youth teaching the younger ones to volunteer is pretty dynamic.”

Rockhurst University aims to make the same kind of connections this year, said Alicia Douglas, the university’s director of community relations and outreach.

As they have in the past, students will scatter out among social service agencies as Goser did, to sites including reStart’s downtown homeless shelter, the Franciscan Mission Warehouse, Ronald McDonald House and Project Uplift.

But the work will also include connections as simple as riding the KCATA Max bus lines, sharing hot chocolate.

“The idea is more than service,” Douglas said. “It’s about getting out to know people and get in conversations.”

Rockhurst’s day will start with what has become through the years an interfaith prayer service, mixing religions and languages.

Its spirit and its theme echo a mission throughout many of the service projects planned for the day:

Listen to the legacy.

This story was originally published January 15, 2018 at 8:00 AM with the headline "National Day of Service honors King’s legacy in reaching for ‘the beloved community’."