If you’ve tried in the past to find service opportunities in the Heber Valley but were unsuccessful, you’re not alone. It’s not that there aren’t opportunities out there — historically they’ve just been hard to find.
Now, thanks to JustServe.org and a group of Heber Valley residents, you’re just a few clicks away from serving your community.
JustServe is a website that lists local service opportunities and helps make serving our communities easier. Anyone can go to the site, type in his or her zip code, and dozens of service opportunities in that area will pop up. They aren’t all just the usual projects like food-kitchen staffing or roadside cleanup, either.
While the website is a great resource, it only benefits the community if opportunities are posted. Under the direction of Mary and Terry Pitts, a group of residents including Hi McHaughton, Rex and Anna Dahl, Bill and Nancy Peckney, and Raelynn Kohler went all over the valley, visiting hospitals, libraries, the prison, the airport and the alternative high school looking for local volunteer opportunities.
“A lot of these places were advertising in the Wasatch Wave,” Hi said. The team collected all of the service details and consolidated the information on the JustServe website. “It really mushroomed from there.”
JustServe has a wide variety of postings — things like cleaning and painting fire hydrants at the airport, reading to kids at Heber Valley Elementary and greeting guests at the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum.
The JustServe website isn’t just for finding volunteer opportunities — you can post them, too. “Anyone can post service opportunities,” Hi explained. “You can say, ‘We’re going to go as a family to paint widow Johnson’s house.’ As long as it’s not for-profit for a business.”
Every summer J.R. Smith Elementary School needs people to help stuff envelopes in preparation for the beginning of the school year, and it usually takes four or five hours to finish. When the school posted this to JustServe, however, so many volunteers showed up that it took just a half hour!
Hi said that even though JustServe is run through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the site is for everyone. “It’s for building community unity,” she said. “It’s for people of all faiths and denominations. Our doctrines may not be the same, but our hearts are the same. We all believe in being kind.”
Want To Serve? Here’s How!
- Go to JustServe.org.
- Type in your zip code.
- Pick a service opportunity and click “volunteer.”
- Sign up for an account – you just need an email address.
- Type in your availability to the service opportunity and click “Submit.”
