Cheers to Valley’s spirit of giving

Four years ago a group of Mat-Su Borough churches joined their Thanksgiving food sharing programs to create Valley Thanksgiving Blessing, which was Saturday this year.

That first year, food was shared at three sites around the Valley. This year, the blessing is expected to serve more than 10,000 people at sites in Anchorage and the Mat-Su.

This is one more of those stories we write every year in an effort to connect hungry people with folks who have enough to share. It’s a story we are happy to repeat for other reasons, too.

Here on the edge of the wilderness we think it’s clear to most people, we’re here to help each other. It just takes one house fire, health crisis or car wreck to find out we really do need our neighbors’ help. And while these sorts of life changing events are terrible, when we interview our neighbors struggling to survive such losses, they say they are buoyed by outpourings of kindness from family, friends and strangers.

Few weeks pass without a story in the Frontiersman about neighbors helping neighbors. Or outlining ways neighbors can help another neighbor. It’s one of the things that makes the Valley truly special — that we help each other.

Valley Thanksgiving Blessing is one of the manifestations of this quality in our community. Sometimes churches seem isolated from the community. Not in the Valley. Here we see many examples of community projects led by churches, or community projects where churches join in and provide huge chunks of labor, or cash.

This year families will find an added bit of love in their food baskets in the way of homemade dinner rolls. A crew of about 20 volunteers from various Valley churches has spent the past two weeks baking 6,000 dinner rolls for the occasion.

The work is being done in a new commercial kitchen that is being used to teach cooking classes, prepare meals for homeless teens and train students in the Next Step program to clean in a commercial kitchen. This was just the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church’s kitchen, until members there put together a plan, got funding and then got their hands dirty building a new 1,000-square-foot, state-certified, commercial kitchen.

We imagine this new kitchen will see some use preparing the meal for the annual Christmas Friendship Dinner celebration, too. This community event was started by a local businessman, but has long since outgrown his restaurant and now serves hundreds each Dec. 25 at the Curtis D. Menard Center in Wasilla.

It’s also timely to mention Santa Cop and Heroes, which started as a holiday gift-giving program for seniors and has expanded to help seniors year-round, and the Mat-Su Special Santa program, which collects and shares gifts with thousands of local children every Christmas.

All of these one-of-a-kind efforts were started by our neighbors in the Mat-Su Borough, which makes us especially glad to single them out as laudable and worthy of your donations of time, talent and, as always, cash.