Volunteers Give Back
Playing For Keeps
If you are interested in music and making new friends, James Broderick has a perfect opportunity.
Broderick is volunteer coordinator for the Sacramento chapter of Guitars for Vets, a national nonprofit that provides free guitar instruction to struggling veterans.
“The vets we serve have been referred to us by counselors and therapists at the VA and lessons are held at VA facilities,” Broderick says. “Few of the vets we teach have any musical experience. For the most part, we’re talking raw beginners.
“Our goal for 2022 is to expand our volunteer corps dramatically and unleash an army of guitar players upon the world.”
Nailing Down Hope
When Denise Rochelle McCoy dons a pink hard hat in March to participate in the annual Women Build event for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Sacramento, it will bring back memories. McCoy wore a hard hat to build her own Habitat house in 2015, when she took the leap into homeownership.
“I was renting a one-bedroom apartment in a challenging neighborhood where there was a lot of violence after losing my job,” McCoy says. “I thought, am I ever going to get out of this? It took three years of research, cleaning up my credit and saving money for a down payment, but I finally purchased my current property through Habitat for Humanity in 2015.”
Leaving a Legacy
Colette Lonchar is a senior at C.K. McClatchy High School who takes her legacy seriously.
To encourage more students to participate in the Parent Teacher Student Association, she started a scholarship program to pay membership fees. She calls it the Ulrich Oldham Legacy Fund, named for her grandmother and great-grandmother.
“The PTSA controls so many different elements of campus life,” says Lonchar, who joined as a sophomore after the group invited her to sing the national anthem at National Night Out. “Becoming a part of (the PTSA), you can make direct contributions to budget plans, talk about day-to-day social life at school, how we can improve, what we can invest in. That’s why I want more students to get involved.”
It Takes A Village
Trish Levin and Carol Voyles have nearly 600 grandchildren. No, they’re not all biological.
Most of the kids are students at Ethel Phillips Elementary School in the City Farms neighborhood south of Sutterville Road. But that doesn’t mean Levin and Voyles love them any less.
Playing By The Rules
Playing By The Rules Greenhaven umpire has volunteered in all 50 states By Jessica Laskey September 2021 Alan McCullough has a large map in his office covered in baseball stickers. Each sticker represents the location of a Little League game he’s...
Green Thumbs
If you see two people in their late 70s weeding, planting or pruning in William Land Park, they’re probably Jeannie and Dale Claypoole, longtime Land Park residents who have made it their mission to keep the area beautiful.
“We’re advocates for the park,” says Jeannie, a certified Master Gardener and former school psychologist whose green thumb is behind much of the landscaping at McClatchy High School, along Sutterville Road and in Land Park. “If something’s not right, we try to find somebody who will make it right.”
