Day of Service
Happy to Help: Posing in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Denver’s City Park, are some of the union members and Council 76 leaders who volunteered to pick up trash before Colorado’s “Marade.”
Photo Credit:
Vicky Hardy
Pres. Barack Obama urged Americans to spend Jan. 19—the day before his inauguration and the one set aside to honor the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—in a ‘National Day of Community Service.’ AFSCME members came out in full force to help improve communities across the nation. A nine-person contingent from Wisconsin Council 24 joined hundreds of volunteers in the Big Easy where they helped to restore areas still suffering the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the city in 2005. Council Pres. Bob McLinn says they made “a real difference for a community that deserves much better than it has gotten from the powers that be.”
Several members of California Local 3299 also volunteered in New Orleans. Diamond Robertson is a principal food service worker at the University of California/Davis Medical Center. She helped to create a baseball diamond on land that was once home to a school. “I wish we could have spent more hours doing community service,” she says.
In Hawaii, some 100 people picked up trash as part of AFSCME’s “Beach Clean Up” at Magic Island Beach Park, near Waikiki. They included members of Hawaii Government Employees Association (HGEA)/AFSCME Local 152 and its sister unions, the United Public Workers/AFSCME Local 646 and East-West Center/AFSCME Local 928.
“Afterward, we participated in a Martin Luther King parade through Waikiki,” says HGEA Pres. Richard Onishi, an information systems analyst for the County of Hawaii. “It was truly a great day for union members in Hawaii.”
In Denver, Colo., union members helped clean up the route of the “Marade,” a huge parade honoring AFSCME sanitation workers—members of Local 1733—whose 1968 strike for union recognition brought Dr. King to Memphis, where he was assassinated. “The Day of Service was a very important event for me,” says Vicky Hardy, a retired school library employee who had been a member of Local 3375 (Colorado Council 76). “It incorporated the civil rights movement and the labor movement. Two movements, one goal.”
