Our winter season

 We have taken a break from the after school program for the holiday season. We asked all our volunteers to help support every child in our after school program by buying a christmas gift. This is about 35 students. In a matter of days, you guys all helped support every child involved in the GreenHouse. We had Christmas celebrations for each program. At Evergreen, we had a group of students come in and play Christmas games and help make gingerbread houses. Club 56 (Our bible study for 5th and 6th graders) put on a great play that told the story of Jesus' birth and sang a few Christmas carols. After all the celebration, the students opened their gifts from you( our awesome volunteers!). They were all surprised and left with smiles on their faces. It was a great day for the Evergreen students!

R4, opened their gifts on their last day of the after school program. All the teens were very surprised to get gifts from their study buddies. All of them were every excited to receive their gifts. They had a separate Christmas party that L.I.T. put on for Oasis (Our bible study for midlle and high school age students) later that week.


We had a very successful winter event on December 16th and 17th. This was the second year that we had Melvin's Hope Christmas Store for the families of River Garden Estate, Natomas Court, and American River Village in Natomas. We served 114 families in the course of two days! We had over 900 toys to sell to the families and included free gift wrapping. We had an enormous amount of support from numerous place to receive donated toys for our families. We had toys from barbies, transformers, basketballs to Ugg shoes and jewelry.  We also had three Christmas trees donated by Southwest Airlines and two gently used girl bikes as raffles for the event. We had a great support from our members of the Parent Action Team that weekend. We had 14 parents help set up, volunteer in the store, and tear down. What a blessing to have so many parents involved in the Melvin's Hope Christmas Store! They have been a dedicated group of individuals that have been meeting bi-weekly to discuss issues of the community that they want to see change, event planning and helping volunteer for the actual event! The Greenhouse could not be doing what we do without the support of our Parent Action Team! Parents put in 124 hours into Melvin's Hope Christmas Store! Thank you!

Right before we ended our programs for the year, our volunteer of the week was awarded to Felipe Calixto! He is one our youngest volunteers. He is a senior at Inderkum High School and has been volunteering through Evergreen at The GreenHouse since September 2011. He has been a great volunteer. He always comes on time and is great with the kids! He has been dedicated to The GreenHouse and has been great as a homework helper. We are sad to say, but Felipe moved farther from the GreenHouse and is not able to continue to volunteer for the remainder of the year. Thank you Felipe for all your hard work and we will miss you!