MLK Day Experience 2022: Friends of the Park

MLK Day of Service had a bit of a rocky start in 2022. What was initially scheduled to take place on the national holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, was pushed back to the next Saturday because of snow. That did not stop students from showing up in large numbers to help various organizations across the city of Alliance. 

I volunteered with Kappa Kappa Psi, the honorary band service fraternity, and we were assigned to Friends of the Park, a non-profit organization that, according to its Facebook page, is dedicated to the improvement, maintenance, and programming in Alliance Parks. One of the most notable events they sponsor is the annual Easter Egg Hunt held in Butler Rodman Park. While volunteering there, my group’s job was to help prepare for the egg hunt by filling thousands of Easter eggs with candy and taping them shut. That number was not an exaggeration; the woman in charge told all the volunteers that the goal was to have 20,000 eggs ready for the event in April. 

My group of six turned on the WRMU app to listen to music as we formed an assembly line. Half of us would put a piece of candy into an egg and the other half would take that egg to tape it shut. For three hours we kept this rhythm, only broken by periods where there were so many eggs that all six of us would have to tape them. By the end, we estimated that our group alone had stuffed around 2,000 eggs, a feat we were very proud of. Our hands were dry and smelled of plastic. 

There are many other stories and experiences from that day. Just ask anyone wearing a Mount Union Regula Center shirt and they’ll be happy to tell you what they were up to. More than that, we can all heartily recommend signing up for MLK Day of Service in 2023.