GFWC Volunteers in Action: GFWC Meadowlarks; GFWC Pennsylvania South Central District; Woman’s Club of Vista; Grundy Woman’s Club

June 3, 2019

GFWC Wyoming welcomes their newest club–the GFWC Meadowlarks, federated in May 2019 at the Wyoming State Conference! It’s a single purpose club that only meets in the summer months.  The projects already planned by the club members are to paint two rooms at the local homeless shelter, hold a garage sale, and provide lunch for the Habitat for Humanity building crew. We can’t wait to see these Volunteers in Action get started!

Five members of the Woman’s Club of Hartland (Wisconsin) collected 1,219 pairs of shoes, surpassing their goal of 1,000 pairs! They set up drop-off sites around the community, collected from those sites, and packed the shoes into 88 boxes to ship. Soles4Souls will receive 1,170 pairs, and the remaining shoes will go to the NIKE Reuse-a-Shoe program. They questioned whether they’d meet their goal, but they met it within two weeks! The club is so grateful for their community’s generosity.

Barb Christensen, Donna LeVeille, Kathy Loftis, Robyn Allen, and Joy Vilter collected shoes for the club.

Clubwomen from the GFWC Pennsylvania South Central District and students from Central Pennsylvania HOBY got together and made 305 boxes for The Jared Box Project. A Jared Box is a plastic shoe-box sized storage container filled with small gifts, toys, games, and other fun activities selected for a child’s specific age and gender. The goal of the Jared Box Project is to lift the spirits of children who are being treated in hospitals. The boxes were donated to Holy Spirit Hospital in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania for hospitalized children of all ages. They also decorated 67 decorated pillow cases for children to use instead of a garbage bag when removed from their homes. Draw strings were added to the pillow cases so they can be used to transport items.

With enthusiasm and energy to spare, students in the California Scholastic Federation at Vista High School volunteered at the Earth Day Festival at Alta Vista Botanical Gardens. Fifty-seven students made crafts for families to do, pulled weeds, sorted trash, and cleaned up after the Festival. “Farmer Jones” aka Nancy B. Jones of the Woman’s Club of Vista (California) delivered appreciation certificates to the students.

When the Grundy Woman’s Club (Virginia) celebrated GFWC’s Federation Day on April 24 by sponsoring the Women in Entrepreneurship Conference: ‘Empowering Women.’ They sent five clubwomen to participate in workshops and bring back the insight gleaned over the course of the one-day event. Held at the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon, Virginia, the conference was hosted by the Virginia Tech Southwest Center and featured a dozen female entrepreneurs, who spoke on success in business, as well as in life. The purpose of the event was to encourage women to engage their skills and talents to support themselves and their families, as well as to contribute to the economy of the region.

Grundy clubwomen JoBeth Wampler, Sandy Stiltner, Betty Shields, Ginger Robertson, and Diane Lynch joined 59
other women in attendance at the event, which is expected to be held again in 2020.