How to Help Victims of the Oklahoma Tornado

Donating money to organizations that help victims is quick and easy.

Americans across the country are reacting with shock to the devastation caused by a 2-mile wide Tornado in Oklahoma. Dozens have died, and President Obama has declared the path of the tornado a major disaster area.  If you would like to help, you can do so from your computer or mobile device right now. Patch will be posting stories of locals who are working to help victims from afar. If you know of someone local was affected by the tornado or who is working to help the victims, please contact your local editor.

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Glen Ellyn Student Gives Back During Mardi Gras

A Marquette University student participated in a special service program to help out in post-Katrina New Orleans.

From Marquette University Margaret King, a junior writing intensive English major from Glen Ellyn traveled to New Orleans over winter break with the Marquette MARDI GRAS program. MARDI GRAS, which stands for Making A Real Difference in the Gulf Region and Areas Surrounding, is a student-run organization at Marquette, created in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf region. MARDI GRAS aims to form meaningful relationships within the community of New Orleans, rebuild homes and neighborhoods and raise awareness about the needs of the post-Katrina Gulf region. For one week during winter break, King and 94 other Marquette students drove 16 hours to New Orleans in vans and worked on 10 different sites once they arrived. Their tasks …

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Glen Ellyn's Tina Koral Launches GardenWorks to Help Families in Need

GardenWorks is a grassroots program in its second year in DuPage County. The program will help families in need grow their own fresh vegetables.

The ground is hard as a rock and planting season is months away, but for one Glen Ellyn resident, gardening season can’t arrive soon enough. Tina Koral, owner of landscape design firm Tina Koral Gardens, is not thinking about her own garden. Rather, she is planning how to help others throughout the area learn to grow and cultivate their own food. Koral founded GardenWorks DuPage, a grassroots project with the goal of eliminating hunger and providing fresh, healthy produce to families in need. Families who participate in GardenWorks will have a vegetable garden planted at their home and receive instruction on how to maintain the plot. The GardenWorks project helped four families last year. Koral and her husband funded the project, she said…

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Wonderful Wednesday

Robin Currie: Volunteering Around the Globe

Robin Currie spends three weeks out of the year in remote areas around the world volunteering to teach English literacy.

By now Robin Currie should be settling in to her temporary home away from home. Currie left Glen Ellyn last Friday on a three-week volunteer trip to Morocco where she will help students learn English language skills. Since 2008, Currie has taken the three week volunteer vacations, where she gives back and helps others. The Glen Ellyn resident and pastor associate at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church has previously volunteered in South Africa, India, Russia and China. “In retirement you don’t quit doing things, you just do what you love,” she said. Though many people make visits to the countries where Currie has volunteered, her work is often in small rural villages that are anything but cosmopolitan. While many Americans may visit Marrakesh or …

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Your Volunteer Guide for Glen Ellyn

One Group's Mission to Cleanup the Great Western Trail

Volunteers gather to clean up our local trail

Come rain come shine, it’s trail cleaning time! With this year’s Earth Day having just passed, there’s no better time to think about our environment. By environment I don’t just mean pollution, greenhouse gases, and ozone layer-holes. I’m talking about the world directly around us, the things we see (and possibly use) every day. The sidewalks in front of our homes, the parks down the street, the baseball fields around the corner and even the trail we hike or bike on Saturday mornings. 'But I don’t know how to help the grass grow, or spread the trail dirt evenly and properly,' you may be saying. None of that matters. This particular volunteer effort is devoted strictly to trash removal. Things that don’t belong, water bottles strewn from …

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Your Volunteer Guide for Glen Ellyn

The Young Ambassadors

The Forest Glen Elementary School ambassador program has been active for only one year but has shown exceptional promise.

Being an ambassador means representing a group well to others in this case students, with integrity, honesty and trustworthiness. The students in the Young Ambassadors program at Forest Glen Elementary School are doing just that. The Forest Glen Ambassador program has been active for only one year but has shown exceptional promise, according to founder Therese Crawford. “It was modeled after Ben Franklin Elementary School’s program of the same name, which has been successful for three to four years,” Crawford said. According to Crawford, a similar program is also run at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School. The primary difference between the two programs is that Lincoln is run more like a student council and is more civic-oriented, whereas …

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Your Volunteer Guide for Glen Ellyn

A Week Not Fit For the Weak

"Celebrating People in Action"

In 1974, former President Richard Nixon released an executive order to establish National Volunteer Week. Since then every sitting president and even local mayors and governors have requested Americans put their efforts toward improving their communities through various outreach organizations. Each year during one week in April, our fellow Americans band together to illustrate the week’s theme and “Celebrate [and become] people in action”. Sponsored by the Points of Light Institute in combination with the Hands On Network, this year’s Week is coming to an end. It’s not, however, too late to get out and do something active! Though we generally encourage volunteerism throughout the year (hello, what’s the theme of this column?!), this is the…

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Your Volunteer Guide for Glen Ellyn

Teens Taking Initiative

Teens4Uganda raises money to help educate a girl their own age, halfway around the world.

Most teens struggle to successfully juggle their schoolwork, social time and extra-curricular activities. Junior Anna Soane and sophomore Caitlin Soane, sisters, have found time in between soccer games and basketball practices to keep their grades up, spend time with family, maintain their friendships and start a fundraising organization. Yes, you read that correctly. The two Glenbard West students started their own fundraising organization, called Teens4Uganda. Teens4Uganda spawned from the sisters’ deep-rooted desires to help others. The entire Soane family does various community service/volunteer activities every year. Among said activities is the family’s own sponsorship of a Ugandan child, Mugeyni, through the Children of Uganda …

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All Things Parenting

Forest Glen School Is Focusing On Community Service Projects

Check out how students at Forest Glen are giving back and being creative too.

This year at Forest Glen School, the PTA parents are focusing on giving to others while they celebrate holiday parties.  In the past, some classes did service projects on their own, if the parents for that room decided to do so. Often schools do grand projects when a world wide event occurs like the Haiti earthquake and the tsunami in Thailand. This year the PTA suggested that every homeroom do at least one service project throughout the year at one of the standard holiday parties it does in the classroom. This would help balance all the wonderful treats the children receive with some focus on giving. Of course it was not required, but encouraged, and the response from parents was overwhelming.  Many classrooms have done projects for all …

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Your Volunteer Guide for Glen Ellyn

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Speeding Through Glen Ellyn!

Volunteers make the Glen Ellyn Speed Skating Team fly!

"Professional speed skating is different than other career sports, it's not about the money," said head coach Carl Cepuran of the Glen Ellyn Speed Skating Team. The "small sport" of speed skating depends on volunteers as a whole. Similarly, volunteers are the glue that holds the Glen Ellyn speed skating team together. "The Glen Ellyn Speed Skating team is a 100 percent volunteer organization, that has a grassroots and community-centric culture of hospitality and service, while bringing a national-level, professional quality expertise to what we do in the community," Cepuran said via e-mail. He explained that "what they do" is teach and promote the sport of speed skating. The team was formed in 1937 after the Illinois State Outdoor …

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