After a week commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bellarmine University’s Office of Identity and Inclusion and Center for Community Engagement held an essential needs drive on MLK Day to benefit La Casita Center, a non-profit dedicated to helping the Latinx community in Louisville.
Bellarmine community members donated essential goods, including canned food and hygiene products, and also helped craft cards with thoughtful messages to go along with the donations.
The event was originally meant to be a boots-on-the-ground service day involving multiple organizations but was changed due to rising COVID cases in the Louisville community.
Community Engagement Advisor Catherine Gomez said: “Since we had to cancel, we reached out to all the organizations we had to cancel on and said, ‘Hey, do you have a remote project we can do instead of going out to the community?’ La Casita Center did have a remote project, so we kind of gave them all our love.”
Associate Director of The Center for Community Engagement Liz Byron emphasized the importance of MLK Day being a day to take action.
Byron said, “Days like this are meant to honor MLK but also to be ‘days on’ that he would want people to be out doing the work to raise up community.”
Members of the Bellarmine community, students, faculty, staff, and others who turned out to show their support said they appreciated the COVID-sensitive change to the event.
Bellarmine community member Kylie Noltemeyer said, “I like the concept that it’s a day of service that is COVID-safe.”
This was Bellarmine’s inaugural MLK Week celebration. Byron said she believes it will become a tradition at Bellarmine and hopes in future years that even more members of the Bellarmine community will join in commemorating MLK and his vision through community engagement.
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