GROUP OF THE MONTH
HELPING HANDS LOVING HEARTS
by: Ricardo Teano, Membership Committee
This Helping Hands, Loving Hearts Ministry is an official ministry under Service and Community Outreach of Santiago Church. It is an on-call volunteer group. The help is on an ‘as needed’ basis with special projects. Examples of work include but not limited to preparing parish mailers, stuffing hundreds and hundreds of envelops with letters from the Pastor, brochures, or tickets, pasting address tags and covers, setting up events like decorating church for holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Lent, pack lunch bags for Camino pilgrims, candies for Halloween or for Easter Egg giveaways, giving Matthew Kelly books at the plaza on Christmas, Lent, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, name tag Sundays, putting pencils and intention papers on both sides of all the pews on the Getting-To-Know-You weekends once a month, wrapping/preparing parish gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas. and many other work that requires a lot of helping hands who together make the work light. Donuts and coffee served enliven the group in these lively events.
The Loving Hands participants are contacted before an event and given the opportunity to help. This ministry is good for parishioners who want to join a ministry, but due to busy schedules, can place their names on the Helping Hands callout list and volunteer in activities as their schedules allow. The contacts for you to be included in the on-call list are Ricardo Teano 949 632 1961, Mark Angel 949 466 5733, and Angel Garcia 949 633 3893. We have 3 additional event leaders; David Gray, Domingo Roldan, and Dennis Fung, to cover all the English Masses as we also handle the monthly Getting-To-Know-You Weekend. Leaders Emiliano Leonides, Arturo Gonzalez, and Ovidio Najera take care of the Spanish masses.
Each leader has about 30-40 volunteers to call if there is a job to work on. This list has been gathered from recruitments done in the past and on Ministry Fairs. A good number of them respond. Most of the work is strategically scheduled after the 8:00 AM weekday Masses for Father Thomas’ reminder announcement. Most work is done so fast with helpers numbering 30-40 together. God is good!!! All the time!!!
