A New Year: Volunteer

February 16, 2024

Charlotte, NC - Spring is almost here, but there is still much time to make an impact in 2024: volunteer. While every new year does not promise a guarantee on our resolutions, volunteering to impact your community produces lifelong benefits. In the past two years, I joined great outreach organizations such as the Charlotte Mecklenburg Dream Center.

The Charlotte Mecklenburg Dream Center was founded in 2014 by husband-and-wife team Jim and Karen Noble. A branch of the Los Angeles-based Dream Center Network, CMDC’s mission, according to its website, is to “raise up disciples and transform communities through consistent, Christ-centered, community-based engagement, and meeting the needs of the whole person—spirit, soul, and body.” The Dream Center meets the needs of its community by hosting and performing outreach to Charlotte’s underserved and homeless population throughout the week.
Volunteers can join any program throughout the week to serve the Charlottean community. A few of the programs I have participated in include Sunday Meal Service, Friday Night Food Prep, Friday Night Street Ministry, YTH Night Live, and Adopt-A-Block. The beauty of these programs is that one can serve both adults and children throughout these ministries. Particularly, Adopt-A-Block often serves three underserved neighborhoods in Charlotte: J.T. Williams, Reid Park, and Thomasboro. On its website, CMDC states its mission for these neighborhoods is “to give hope and bring transformation . . . through consistent and dedicated home visits, relationship building and physical acts of service.”

Through experience, Adopt-A-Block enables more direct engagement with the people whom one is serving: both the children and, sometimes, their parents or guardians. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached, and residents are fed, ministered to, and are free to enjoy a day of fun catered specifically, for them. Friday Night Food Prep allows volunteers to assemble 120-160 World Famous Charlotte Mecklenburg Dream Center Chili Cheese Hot Dogs for the Street Ministry team to distribute to the homeless population in Uptown Charlotte. CMDC calls this population their “friends.”
This is the heart of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Dream Center: to serve people as if they were their own friends and family members. The Dream Center also hosts a church service every Sunday, named Restoring Place Church (also known as the Dream Center Church of Charlotte). If you want to make an impact this year, consider volunteering with the Dream Center if you share the same heart as the CMDC posts on their website: “To See Lives Transformed Through the Power of the Gospel.”
This Lenten season brings reminders of that Gospel message most profoundly noted in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Let this year be the year that you share that Gospel message through serving those who may never hear the gospel or know God’s love without your presence in their lives.