1,800 Volunteer for Make a Difference Day!

Their weapons: brushes, brooms and rakes; hammers, drills and trash bags. Their missions:  weeding, painting and planting; clearing brush, moving offices and installing cabinets.  They spruced up campsites, organized bookshelves and collected food for the hungry.  They painted playgrounds at elementary schools, fences at an animal sanctuary, and porches at the historic Newhall Ranch House.  They came, they worked, and at the end of Santa Clarita’s 11th annual Make a Difference Day, close to 1,800 volunteers clocked in a combined 9,000 hours of service and made changes for the better at local schools and nonprofit organizations.
Part of the country’s largest volunteer service effort, Make a Difference Day, held October 22, is hosted locally by HandsOn Santa Clarita, in partnership with the City of Santa Clarita.  Projects are “hands-on” and designed to produce visible results in one day.  
Volunteers — youngsters to seniors — and came alone, with family or as team members from corporations, schools, churches and service groups.  Forty-five different projects benefited 32 schools and organizations including Carousel Ranch, Child & Family Center, Boys & Girls Club of SCV, the SCV Food Pantry, Gibbon Conservation Center, Help the Children, L.A.R.C. Ranch, Gentle Barn, SCV Senior Center, Emergency Winter Shelter and the SCV Historical Society.
Make a Difference Day takes place next year on Saturday, October 27, 2012.