Northwest ISD Education Foundation Partners with JustServe and Service Missionaries

Featured Photo: NEF Executive Director Jennifer Burton, right, with Alyssa Edstrom and Sister Kennedy Turner. Photo by Kristy Taylor

In the Alliance Texas congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, JustServe and the service missionaries have hit upon a great partnership with Northwest ISD Education Foundation (NEF). NEF is the official charity of Northwest Independent School District and supports all campuses across a 234 sq. miles district footprint. NEF engages the community, empowers educators, and encourages future-ready students. In addition to funding teaching grants and student scholarships, both intended to enhance educational opportunities in and out of the classroom, NEF funds school supplies and food pantry items for families in need, offers snack packs during the summer months when school lunches aren’t available, organizes Secret Santa projects during the holidays, and even recently helped one family in the district rebuild their uninhabitable home so the young students living there had a safe and warm place to come home to every day. 

The NEF Executive Director, Jennifer Burton, is enthusiastic and compassionate about the students in her district:

“It has been one of the greatest blessings in my life to be able to assess, recognize, and meet the needs of our teachers and students. The unique challenges presented over the last eighteen months allowed us to rally a community of support and build new, long-lasting friendships that will be NISD supporters for many years to come.”

Just over a year ago, after a chance discussion with a friend in one of the Alliance Texas congregations, she teamed up with Kristy Taylor, the Alliance Texas JustServe Volunteer Specialist.  It turned out to be a friendship and partnership that has expanded from there. 

JustServe operates as a free community outreach program sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  JustServe’s mission is to “build unity through community service.”  To reach that goal, JustServe Volunteer Specialists, like Kristy Taylor, get to know local charitable organizations and assess their volunteer needs. The specialists then compile those needs onto the website, www.justserve.org, where anyone looking to volunteer, regardless of their religious preference, can enter their zip code and find links to organizations in the area in need of their help—like a matchmaking service for volunteers and charities. The website is free to both the volunteer and the charity and aims to build relationships in the community, recognizing the importance of serving among your neighbors.

At first, Jennifer and members of her NEF team would contact Kristy Taylor with their needs, and Kristy would send out requests to volunteers through JustServe and her social media and newsletter avenues.  Over the last 18 months, volunteers in the area have collected water and lunch items during the months that the schools were remote in order to provide lunches to those in need. JustServe volunteers assisted NEF with Resource Store inventory, have sorted files, helped move offices with the full-time proselyting missionaries lending their muscle, and most recently, with the help of NEF’s first service missionary, cataloged young reader books that were distributed to all NISD summer school learners.   

Service Missionaries Join NEF

Part of JustServe’s outreach is assisting the Service Mission Leader to find places for service missionaries to spend their time.  Service missionaries are young people, living at home, who have dedicated their next six to 24 months in full-time volunteer service.  Elder Doug and Sister Michelle Clark, the Texas Fort Worth Service Mission Leaders, are responsible for placing service missionaries under their care with local charities and Church operations.  There are currently 27 service missionaries in north Texas, eleven of those are in Fort Worth, including four in the Alliance congregations, which encompass Trophy Club, Justin, Roanoke, Haslet, and parts of North Fort Worth.  These numbers are a huge increase from two years ago when there were just four service missionaries in all of North Texas. According to Elder Clark, “JustServe and the Fort Worth Service Mission work arm-in-arm to help area charities serve the less fortunate in our communities. By combining our resources, we help those charities with the manpower needed for large events as well as carrying out their daily administrative and operational needs.”

About six months ago, Elder Clark, asked Alliance JustServe about opportunities for a young woman in the area.  Because JustServe already had a relationship with NEF, the Education Foundation became a great contact for Elder Clark.  Sister Kennedy Turner was the first service missionary placed with NEF; she started working there three days a week. The wonderful full-time employees at NEF immediately took Sister Turner under their wing and gave her an office of her own accompanied by the responsibilities to bring in volunteers for their projects, as well as other office tasks. Sister Turner “enjoys the opportunity to support NEF and give back to the teachers that helped guide and mold my time during NISD. The staff at NEF have been welcoming and provide me with the support I need to be successful in my service mission. I know the tasks I am doing today will benefit me greatly in my professional career in the future.”

One of Sister Turner’s first projects was to catalog hundreds of boxes of books donated for young readers to go out to various classrooms on different campuses across the district. The Lucy Book project took up an entire hallway at the NEF offices, and an empty classroom was quickly turned into a workstation for volunteers. Sister Turner and Alyssa Edstrom, Director of Communications and Public Relations for NEF, put together a sign-up genius, shared it with Kristy Taylor, who in turn shared it with missionaries and JustServe volunteers, and the volunteers started to flow in. Sitting at laptops around the room, volunteers would sort through the boxes, scan, and catalog the books, then move on to the next box—for weeks and weeks. In all, NEF and their volunteers sorted more than two hundred boxes of books.

“There is absolutely no way we could have accomplished this project without the support of JustServe. Because of the incredible support, NEF supplied more than five hundred students participating in summer learning with a pack of books of their own to continue their reading throughout the summer,” said Alyssa Edstrom.

Since Sister Turner started at NEF, two more service missionaries have begun working there as well, each of them working two days a week at NEF and another three days a week in other area charities and Church operations.  The women who work at the NEF office have taken great care of the service missionaries, and in turn, those missionaries are glad to spend their days and months working with such a supportive staff accomplishing meaningful projects that help so many of the young students and their families in the area.  It is not often that a partnership works out as well for everyone involved, but when you have service missionaries eager to serve, JustServe volunteers ready to jump in, and NEF staff so enthusiastic and encouraging, sometimes everyone involved can be blessed to help those around them in great ways.

According to Director Jennifer Burton, “we know how fortunate we are to partner with JustServe and the service missionaries. Often non-profits do as much as possible, with as little as possible. Because of the friendship we’ve built with JustServe in our community, we have been given the opportunity to maximize our programs and give back even more to the students, teachers, and families of NISD”.