Charleston Carriage Community Day of Service with Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach

We wanted to give back to our community, so Charleston CARES has partnered with Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach in 2022. Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach (OLM) serves the Johns Island and Eastside downtown Charleston communities. Since our barns are downtown and our farms are on Johns Island, we thought there’d be no better organization to partner with to help the communities we love so much!

Our Lady of Mercy Community Outreach provides low-income families with a variety of resources and services. They offer dental screenings and OBGYN services for individuals who otherwise lack the ability to pay. They run a food pantry and a clothing closet to ensure these individuals have access to clean clothes and fresh food. They also offer a wealth of classes on topics ranging from financial literacy to career prep and English as a Second Language. For children, they offer after-school programs and a child learning center.

Last Wednesday, we hosted the Carriage Community Day of Service. We collected donations of most-needed items for OLM and a group of volunteers headed out to their Johns Island campus to do some exterior cleaning!

Our volunteers refreshed the paint on the exterior windows and doors of their main building, trimmed the hedges surrounding the main building, and pressure-washed the buildings on their Johns Island campus.

Sanding and buffing the windows before giving them new paint.

Pressure washing at the Johns Island campus

The forecast called for thunderstorms, but fortunately the rain held out until we finished all of our tasks.

Our volunteers painting the window trims around OLM’s outreach building.

Breaking out the power tools to trim the hedges around the outreach building.

We had a great experience working with Our Lady of Mercy for our Carriage Community Day of Service, and we can’t wait to work with them again!