Community Hero Award

The Transportation Team at the House of Fire Ministries was honored with a Community Hero Award by the Community Caring Conference at their annual banquet last evening, October 7, 2010 at the Milan Community Center. Here the team is presented their award.

Last year the English Language Learner's class at the Church of Peace needed a way to transport the students and their children to and from the classes. The House of Fire Ministries offered their van, and several members of the church volunteered to take turns driving the van to and from the classes. This was a huge help. The weather was often nasty, and the very new immigrants who take the class do not own cars or drive. This was a ministry of love, and meant a lot to the families being transported and to the Lights ON program.

It was wonderful to have House of Fire Ministries as a collaborator with the Church of Peace, Rock Island School District #41, the Regional Office of Education, Blackhawk College and the Rock Island Library in supporting family literacy in our community.

It was great to see them recognized and honored for this ministry.

Intersession Lunch

During the two week hiatus for the Rock Island Schools, called the 'intersession," we are serving lunch to children here at the Church of Peace. Today was a busy day. Since the kitchen prepared seventy five pieces of pizza and there were still two left, we believe we served lunch to 73 children today! 34 of those children were from the Academy down the street. So that means that 39 neighborhood children were able to attend on their own. (It is hard to get a picture of the crowd with my little camera.)
Here are the three food servers: Nora, Corinne and Tenisha.

On a sad note: We were also scheduled to serve food over at Century Woods apartments, formerly known as Arsenal Courts, during this intersession. We had served up to seventy children per day last summer. The families that live in those apartments have a lot of children. Last Friday, sort of at the last minute, the administration from Century Woods called the church to tell us that we could not serve food at their facility. It turns out that the kids are too messy and too pesky - said they kept coming early to the community room. To me this suggests that the children are bored and hungry. But the administration did not want to be bothered with the children. So no lunch there.

NAMI Walk

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill had their annual walk yesterday, October 2, at Credit Island Park in Davenport. Here is our little team from the Church of Peace.

While we got some donations, the main purpose of fielding a team is to help reduce stigma and begin to treat mental illness, more and more, like other illnesses. Certainly, several members of our church have had bouts with mental illness.

So looking in Sunday's QC Times I noted that our little team made it front and center in their coverage of the NAMI Walk.