Homeless Youth Resource Center

Mandi works at the Volunteers of America Homeless Youth Resource Center in Salt Lake City. It's a place where homeless youth can go during the day for lunch and dinner, clothes, supplies, to get help looking for jobs, and hanging out.
They have volunteers come and cook meals, so our whole family went today and made lunch. They aren't open on weekends, so we thought we'd make them our big Christmas Eve dinner: ham, funeral potatoes, rolls, green beans, jello salad, and sugar cookies. Most of them were very thankful for the meal, one boy came back for seconds saying the ham just melted in his mouth! It was pretty cute. Then there were those (one girl to be exact) that didn't appreciate our food and said that it tasted like crap (only she didn't say crap)! I'm not sure what kind of food she is used to, but like I said, this is our fancy Christmas Eve dinner! Oh well! We all had a good laugh about it!
Here is the kitchen

I wasn't sure what to expect, but this is not at all what I expected!

About half of us were in the kitchen serving food and the other half was in the back sorting and organizing the food.

The kids were good at sorting through the toiletries.

They had a ton of food and toiletries that had been donated, but Mandi said that come June/July, this storage room will be empty!

Harper and Nixon eating apples

Sorting through clothes

Owen helped Amy and I sort through the clothes. We organized them a little better by size and got rid of the clothes that teenagers wouldn't wear.

We were there for a few hours. It was a great experience and I'm glad we had the opportunity to go as a family and help out. It was especially good to go around the holidays and made us realize how thankful we are for all that we have! I'd like to give a shout out for the employees there! I don't know that I could go to work there everyday, but I'm thankful there are people out there who can and do!