You're watching the Cambridge Calendar here on Cambridge Community Television.
We're the go-to source for fun things and events here in the city.
Our guest in the studio is Laurie Lander.
She is the co-founder and co-director of Many Helping Hands, and she's here to talk
about the Martin Luther King Day of Service.
Thanks so much for joining us, Laurie.
Thank you very much for inviting.
So for those of us who haven't heard about Many Helping Hands before, could you just
tell us a little bit about the organization?
Sure.
Many Helping Hands was created to help people find out how they can volunteer and make a
difference in Cambridge.
There's more than 150 nonprofits in Cambridge, and many of them need volunteers to help extend
their work in the community.
Right.
And I understand the Martin Luther King Day of Service first started in 2011, so you guys
have had your seventh year coming up now, so could you tell us a little bit about how
that got started?
Sure.
My family and I went to President Obama's First Inauguration in January 2009, and the
day before was Martin Luther King Day, and tens of thousands of people were out around
the city doing community service projects to make Martin Luther King Day a day on instead
of a day off.
And when we participated, my family and I participated, we came back to Cambridge.
I looked around, and it turned out there was no community service events in Cambridge
or in Boston or anywhere in eastern Massachusetts to commemorate Martin Luther King Day.
So I started talking to friends and to people I knew in the city about whether we could
start one here.
Nice.
And so we did.
Nice.
Nice.
So you've known and adapted since that first time.
So the first one was January 2011, and we had put out a lot of flyers and postcards
to the schools, and we had put up an Eventbrite site, but we really didn't know whether anyone
would show up besides our family and friends.
But when two o'clock came on Martin Luther King Day in 2011, we were at the YWCA in Central
Square, and there were 500 people lined up to come in to do community service projects
for three hours.
And the energy was just like amazing, because you had people from like Brattle Street sitting
down at a table next to a mother and child who were staying in a domestic violence shelter.
Both of them are all of them working on Valentine's Cards for shut-in elders.
And it didn't matter where they were from or what their circumstance was, they were
both trying to reach out and help someone else in need.
That's fantastic.
So the event is coming up January 16th, Martin Luther King Day.
And where is it going to be centered and what type of activities can we expect?
So it sort of takes over Central Square.
We fill City Hall, the senior center across the street from City Hall, the YWCA, St. Peter's
Episcopal Church, and have activities in each of those locations that people can be involved
in making Valentine Cards for isolated elders, making fleece blankets and scarves for every
homeless child, teen and adult in Cambridge, collecting and sorting and then delivering
close to 500 bags of groceries to more than 15 food pantries in the city and much more.
Oh my goodness.
So there's a lot of things to do.
Yeah.
And so you started from those 500 people in 2011.
How many people and organizations are you expecting this year?
So last year we had more than 2,500 volunteers.
So it's made up of individuals, people coming with friends, people coming with their families.
Groups coming from a company or a sorority or school, places like Starbucks, send a big
team of people who help us run projects.
How fun.
It's really great.
How fun.
And what about family-friendly activities?
Are there opportunities for families to get involved?
Yes.
All the projects are family-friendly.
There's nothing that anyone of any age can't do.
For example, we know that not everyone can sew, but for the fleece scarfs and blankets,
Polar Tech is donating about 400 yards of fleece.
And we cut that into scarf and blanket sizes.
And we have hundreds of pairs of scissors and thousands of pins and dozens of volunteer
stitchers.
And so people who've never sewn can still design a scarf for a blanket.
I might like to do that.
This is very cool.
And so it sounds like a very rich assortment of activities and service opportunities.
Is there one in particular that stands out to you from a prior year, something that you
really yourself kind of associated with?
I think that one that stands out particularly is last year we made over 3,400 Valentine's
for isolated elders and for veterans and homeless parents.
And one of the reasons, it sticks out to me for two reasons.
One, that people can come and will sit down and might make one Valentine or might stay
there for three hours and make multiple Valentine's.
So we have paper and card stock and ribbons and glue and also colored pencils and such.
But the flip side of it is that we individual, so the Valentine's go out, some of them get
delivered with meals on wheels.
But some of that we hand deliver about 500 of them to elderly around the city.
And last year when I was delivering one of the Valentine's to an elderly apartment building
in North Cambridge, an elderly man came to the door.
And I gave him the Valentine, but when I looked in the door on his table and his hallway were
cards that we had given him the prior two years.
And that just was like, so, you know, I think we all had tears in our eyes.
It was the idea that it meant, that it really meant something to people.
And is that the same event you're looking forward to this year?
So I very much look forward to that, but I also love the stitching event.
I love, we make activity kits for children waiting in emergency rooms.
Every hotel in Cambridge gives us travel sized toiletries that we make up into personal care
kits for homeless teens and adults in Cambridge and Somerville.
We, as I said, we collect food.
So we distribute bags of food in neighborhoods around the city to every house about a week
before MLK Day and ask them to put a full bag of food out on their doorstep on MLK
Day and teens go around, collect those bags and then bring them to City Hall where we
sort them and then deliver them out.
So there's just like lots of really good projects and tremendous energy of people coming together
and wanting to make a difference that day.
Yeah, no, it sounds fantastic.
Okay, you sold me.
So how do I get involved, how do I earn more?
So you can go to our website, www.manyhelpinghands365.org.
That will direct you to our Eventbrite registration.
We also have a Facebook page, Many Helping Hands.
You could also search on Eventbrite for MLK Day of Service Cambridge and that would lead
you there.
Great, great, great.
And it's free to get involved with that.
It's totally free.
So you can sign up ahead of time, helps us prepare in terms of making sure we have enough
supplies for everyone, but it's also open so that if you haven't gotten around to signing
up but you decide that morning you want to come with some friends, that's okay also.
Great.
Well, thank you so much, Laurie.
Thank you.
Martin Luther King Day of Service coming up January 16th.
Two o'clock.
Two to five o'clock.
In Central Square in Cambridge and Many Helping Hands, 365.org for more info.
Correct.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
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