Friday, April 27 marked the 11th annual Project Faith, a community service project at Faith Christian School.

All students from Kindergarten through 12th grade helped to provide community services to several organizations. This year, the students, staff and parent volunteers at FCS helped Manna Ministries, Charity Cottage and the Rescue Mission in Vinton and Feeding America Southwest Virginia in Salem.

Their help was well-received and much needed: Manna Ministries served around 700 people on Thursday evening, April 26.

The volunteers helped to paint, clean, pull weeds, sort donations, spread new mulch, make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tossed salad, create table favors with inspirational quotes and much more. The art students at FCS also painted a mural at Manna Ministries.

In line with their theme this year, “Feed My Sheep,” the students helped to prepare “6,000 ‘gleaning bags’ for Gleaning America’s fall fruit harvest, which will go to help feed the hungry” according to Susan Childs at Faith Christian School.

Also according to Childs, fundraising efforts as part of Project Faith has totaled over $1 million in the last 11 years, and the last three years alone have totaled over $500,000. (Be sure to check back here for more information on final tallies next week!)

Working indoors and out, the students, parents, staff members and volunteers were certainly lucky to have such beautiful weather on Friday.

“We’ve been doing this for 11 years,” said Sam Cox, Head of School at Faith Christian, “and we’ve had no rain on the day of Project Faith so far. It’s poured the day before or the day after, but not on that day.”