Students flock to Tulsa for community service

Nearly 200 junior high and high school students from all over the country will be traveling to Tulsa, Oklahoma June 23-27 to participate in a number of service projects throughout town.

The groups will be joining Joplin, MO-based Christ In Youth’s Engage: Service team and partnering with Tulsa-based Project Elf – an organization that works with Tulsa Schools to help students receive supplies, clothes and even food, among other things. The organization was founded by Terri Hozhabri and currently includes more than 140 volunteers from throughout Tulsa.

The students coming to town June 23-27 will add to those volunteer totals by partnering with Project Elf to take on a number of projects for Tulsa schools – such as painting halls, intense landscaping around school campuses and other renovation-related projects.

While working alongside Project Elf under the guidance of CIY staff, students will learn what it means to be Kingdom workers within a community. Hozhabri will introduce students to key school leaders and show them how they can get to know similar leaders in their own communities and partner in ways to affect change.

“Any student can be a Kingdom worker wherever they’re at,” said Ben Hedger, Director of Engage for CIY. “They can create a farmers market or work with people in the community to get food to people who need it. They can find ways to be working with their schools to help meet needs in their districts. Challenges of how to meet the needs of the community are questions that today’s students should be asking, and we want to create weeks that cultivate relationships with some of the organizations that are working to address these needs so that when students go back home they’ll have this Christ-centered example of how to be a Kingdom worker in their own homes, schools and communities.”

These weeks are just two out of 13 similar weeks that will take place in cities all over the country. CIY also coordinates mission trips to locations all over the world, and hundreds of students will be traveling to countries such as Cambodia and Honduras this summer.

For more information about CIY or Engage: Service, click here for www.ciy.com/engage.