On Monday, hundreds of Palo Alto residents took part in Palo Alto’s 16th annual Day of Service and Celebration to further the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
This year’s event, held on the national holiday that recognizes the civil rights leader, was co-hosted by the city of Palo Alto, the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center (JCC) and Youth Community Service (YCS). More than 1,200 people took part in a morning of service through 28 different projects, including planting trees and vegetable garden beds, packing hygiene kits for unhoused people and preparing meals.
After the service events concluded, community members congregated at Mitchell Park Community Center for a celebration that featured food trucks, speakers and art displays and musical performances led by local youth.
A number of local leaders, including East Palo Alto Mayor Lisa Gauthier, Palo Alto Mayor Lisa Kou and Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian attended the gathering.
Gauthier encouraged a crowd of all ages to commit to regular service in the community to honor King’s legacy.
She said that she had been moved by the support of surrounding communities when East Palo Alto experienced flooding as a result of the recent storms.
“Water, like love, knows no boundaries,” she said. “Today we honor the legacy of Dr. King together.”
She urged those present to see service as ongoing work, beginning but not ending with the MLK Day of Service.
“We continue to fight for those rights today for others, because that’s our duty and that’s our charge — to not think of ourselves, but think about others,” Gauthier said.
Luba Palant, the JCC’s senior director of culture, learning, and community, reflected on how far the annual event, also known as Mitzvah Day, or good deed day, has come in its 16 years.
“Through this day, MLK Day of Service, I hope and I dream to introduce our families and our community to those organizations and for you to get involved with them and for you to volunteer with them and for you to donate money to them,” she said, thanking all those who gave their time to service organizations.
Families wove their way through tables displaying information about various nonprofits and community service organizations dedicated to serving young people and people experiencing homelessness or poverty, among other causes.
San Mateo resident Olivia Chiang, a junior at The Nueva School, stood by an interactive display she had created for the event. She started a nonprofit, Let’s Talk Unite, after becoming concerned about political polarization and racism in 2020.
“MLK Day really inspired me to look at racial disparities and also racial divisions in the United States,” Chiang said. “I really wanted to take this time to look at a topic that I feel like we don’t really discuss as a community very often or with all community members, and allow people to reflect.”
The display encouraged viewers to reflect on questions about identity and bias. Community members wrote their thoughts on colorful sticky notes to add to the conversation.
At a table representing WeHope, an East Palo Alto-based group that provides services such as showers and laundry to people experiencing homelessness, executive assistant Nakia Davis said that her organization carries out King’s legacy by putting others above themselves.
“With giving back to the community, when we do it, we don’t think about ourselves, we think about the greater good,” she said, describing all the hard work that is dedicated to WeHope’s clients.
A number of young people involved in Youth Community Service were present for the event to help inform attendees about local service organizations and share their art and music.
Nishi Goyal, a YCS peer leader, was one of the organization’s representatives who helped with the community gathering. Her work was displayed alongside her peers’ in the art showcase, which focused on intersectional identity and mental health.
“There’s no better day than on MLK Day to come together as a community and celebrate our diversity, our humanity and our ability to express ourselves through art,” she said.
Encouraging creativity among youth in the community was a clear theme of the day. Nadine Rambeau, the executive director of EPACenter, a youth arts center in East Palo Alto, asked attendees to foster the creativity of young people they knew.
“I think that would be building on King’s legacy — making sure that we invest in the resources for them to be able to be creative, to make completely new things that we didn’t think possible,” she said of investing in youth. “We’ve gotten so far. We’ve got a long way to go.”
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