Flagler student joins national community project

Priscilla Proctor notified Historic City News this afternoon that Flagler College “Students in Free Enterprise” student McKenzie Blaine has become one of 10 college students chosen nationwide to participate in Liberty Mutual’s “Liberty Lends a Hand – The Community Project.”

The project will run from January 2 through January 8, 2011.

Insurance company Liberty Mutual started the “Liberty Lends a Hand” program as a way to help in the response to catastrophic events like the recent southern California wildfires that impacted communities throughout the surrounding Los Angeles area in the summer of 2009.

Blaine will be part of a group that will be working in the Angeles National Forest and at a local elementary school.

“We will be planting new saplings to help replenish the forest and cleaning up an old ranger station,” Blaine said. “There is a ranger station out there that has sat unused for a long time, and it was almost completely demolished. That’s where our [volunteers’] head quarters will be.”

Blaine said that she submitted a required two-minute video to “Liberty Lends a Hand” because she loves helping people.

“It’s an honor to be chosen because this is what I love to do. I love to go and help people,” she said. “I also like to help people not only in my community, but in someone else’s community as well. I like to learn and to take whatever I learn and bring it back here [Flagler College] and perhaps start another new project with Students in Free Enterprise.”

Blaine said that the group will also be working with a local elementary school teaching an “On Site Fire Safety Program” and working with an AIDS Project in the evenings.

Photo credits: © 2010 Historic City News contributed photograph by Priscilla Proctor