Join the ChangeMaker’s Circle!
South County Community Services was founded in 1971 as Vicksburg Community Center, with the aim of planning, promoting, and coordinating efforts that are designed to achieve economic and social benefits for the citizens of the community through the following means:
- The mobilization of talents and insights of the total community who are or may be interested in attacking the conditions which prevent a substantial number of residents from achieving their greatest potential.
- To provide an organizational framework through which local, state, and federal resources may be mobilized and applied to attack the causes and conditions which socially and economically deprive citizens of the district from reaching their potentials.
- To provide a legal, non-profit vehicle through which gifts, grants, and donations can be received and disbursed for the sole purpose of achieving the above purposes.
- To report to the residents (and the public at large) the progress or lack of progress in achieving the above stated purposes.
Since then, we have gone through many changes. Our service area, mission, and name were updated a few years after our initial incorporation in 1971 to include the Schoolcraft and Climax/Scotts areas and to allow for greater provision of assistance to the residents. And in recent years we have moved a few times, added new staff members, and adjusted how we provide services. But throughout all of that, I still see the same original mission and the care that the residents of South County had for those who were less fortunate than themselves—all the way back in 1971—still in SCCS to this day.
We are unveiling a new vision for connecting with our supporters in South County: the ChangeMaker’s Circle. When Diane Knegendorf, Victor Ridenour, Maude Lawton, George Lewis Jr, Shirley Kye, David Chaney, Eva Page, Barbara Stevens, and June Lawrence came together in 1971, they were working together to support the creation of a new agency. We are opening our arms to the community and asking our biggest supporters (you!) in the area to join us as charter members of not just a giving circle, but a doing circle.
The idea behind the program is to encourage supporters to pair gifts with activities (like forwarding our enewsletter to a friend) that go a long way to helping us expand our services and reach new people. We won’t be tracking any of those activities; we’ll rely on the honor system and the fact that we are trying to attract people who deeply care about the work that we do. We have a few different eventual plans for the Circle—one of my favorites is to have annual gatherings of supporters where we can go into depth about the problems we see the community facing and brainstorm about ways to combat them—but to start with, we want to begin welcoming people into the Circle and recognizing them in our agency. To that end, a private donor has provided us with funds to commission a tree from The Wooden Stitch—we will add the name of each member of the ChangeMaker’s Circle to a leaf on the tree.
We have grown and changed considerably since 1971, but the problems that we face are the same: there are still a substantial number of residents unable to reach their greatest potential due to their social or economic conditions. Fortunately, we are still here—a group of residents interested in attacking the causes and conditions that limit those in our community. And now, our numbers are growing.
Click here to join the ChangeMaker’s Circle today!
