Community members to continue AFGM in summer

Home News Community members to continue AFGM in summer

Along with all the delicious pancakes and community fellowship, A Few Good Men will introduce their new summer initiative at their semesterly fundraiser A Few Good Pancakes tomorrow.
This semester’s pancake dinner will start at Free Methodist Church at 5:30 p.m. tomorrow, with speakers to commence at 6 p.m.
The organization, which has as many as 70 regular volunteers each week, constitutes one of the largest volunteer organizations in Hillsdale County, according to sophomore President Jacob Thackston.
“We’re pouring well over 200 volunteer hours into the community each week, and all of that is college students,” Thackston said. “Over the summer, our entire workforce goes away. So what we’re doing this year is more or less raising out of the community a set of crews over the course of the summer to do projects that we just aren’t here to do.”
This year, A Few Good Men will work with Hillsdale residents in order to help offset the absence of college students in the summertime. At the pancake dinner, speeches by senior Tom King and Thackston will outline the particulars of the summer initiative and invite community members to join the effort.
According to Thackston, leaders of A Few Good Men have been working since January to plan the new summer program.
“We’ve only had two summers as an organization — we’re relatively young,” he said. “We’ve tried two different things, and it just didn’t work each time. So this year we decided we’re going to make this work no matter what.”
A Few Good Men help with a variety of projects, ranging from lawn care to helping people move into a new house. In an effort to meet the various needs in the area, the organization hopes to raise 50 crews for summer projects.
In order to make this plan a reality, members of A Few Good Men have reached out to community members, including local churches, businesses, and schools, with an invitation to the pancake dinner. Senior Rachel Zolinski, director of A Few Good Men’s Community Outreach Reaching the Defenseless branch, has helped to coordinate efforts to communicate with local organizations.
“We always had that vision of consistent discipleship and fellowship with the community, but we didn’t know what that would look like, and it originally just started with college students,” Zolinski said. “Within the last year and a half, we’ve tried to implement this idea where we try to find volunteers in the churches who are here year-round.”
Junior Josiah Vega, chief officer of A Few Good Men’s institutional advancement, noted the critical role the summer program will play in the organization’s goal of meeting community needs.
“It’s really important for us to get this going because the goal of A Few Good Men isn’t simply to give college students this kind of out to get community service hours done,” Vega said. “The real focus of A Few Good Men is to revive the community, make it self-sufficient. That’s why the summer program is such a big deal: not only to knock out those projects but also to really fulfill the end goal of A Few Good Men and make the community self-sufficient.”