Students using JustServe gathered more than 5,000 items to assemble 300 hygiene kits that were donated to a nonprofit organization in the eastern Arizona community of St. Johns last November, providing necessities to people in need.
Nearly 330 middle school students, led out by 12 members of the St. Johns Middle School Legacy Leadership Club, gathered the items during the first half of November 2023. Fourth through eighth grade students rallied with their classmates in a friendly competition to ensure that their grade donated the largest number of items.
The winning two grades — fifth and seventh — received a “ditch day” to skip school and hang out in The Loft, a community center refurbished from a former juvenile detention center. Normally, The Loft is open only to students who have graduated from eighth grade but have not graduated from high school. The ditch day gave these younger students a chance to see what The Loft had to offer.
Marcia Ashton, a social studies teacher at St. Johns Middle School, noticed a change in her class of roughly 60 to 70 seventh graders as they collected items for donation. “Initially, it was for the competition,” Ashton said. “But as we gathered more and more stuff, and as kids got involved in it, it was a source of pride, for doing something for the community.”
Members of the St. Johns Middle School Legacy Leadership Club put up flyers in the middle school hallways and encouraged their fellow classmates to donate items. After the donation items were organized and sorted into hygiene kits, around 30 members of the St. Johns High School Legacy Leadership Club took the kits to CareAz, a nonprofit organization that provides necessities to people in need.
Raelene Raban, the St. Johns High School Legacy Leadership Club sponsor, helped deliver the hygiene kits to CareAz. She, along with her middle school sponsor counterpart, Shayla Udall, utilized JustServe to find a service project that the students would be interested in.
Raban said that the JustServe app is her go-to when looking for service projects for the Legacy Leadership Club. “I found that this was a need in our community, because the kids really wanted to do something that would benefit the community.”
Udall said, “I was really impressed by the middle schoolers, not only just by Leadership Club, but the kids who rallied behind it and understood, ‘Hey, we’re doing this for the community.’”
The high school Legacy Leadership Club members delivered the donations to CareAz. A worker at CareAZ who received the supplies from the students became emotional when he saw how many supplies were being donated. “He just was overwhelmed because it’s something that will really benefit the people that need it,” Raban said.
Randi Norton, the Reentry and Recovery Program director at CareAz, said that working with a nonprofit organization and serving so many community members helps people realize that they are “all in this together.”
“There’s a magic in serving others just to serve others,” Norton said. “By serving others and serving the Lord, I get to receive the service of our Savior by all the things that happened in my life, all of the blessings that I receive and the ability to help others.”
