Have you ever wondered how you can get involved in your community during the holidays? Let’s take a sneak peek into what the Estacada Community Center is doing to help out the community during the holidays.  Valerie Hansen-Renteria is the Center Director and General Manager. “During the holidays there’s a couple of things we are doing. We partnered with Eagle Creek Salon which has their annual holiday meals on Christmas Eve and all of our meals on wheels recipients are a part of that and each person will get a gift bag with various donations from local businesses and some bigger named companies and each person with there free meal will also get a gift bag,” said Val. How can other people get involved? Val responded with, “If you are over 18 you have to pass a county background check and have no criminal history. For everyone under 18, we will be making care cards for the holidays to send out with people’s meals just to bring some joy into people’s lives.”

Jan Gillian is a member of the board of directors and the Center’s grant writer ”Some important ways to get involved are volunteering and donating money. We are one of three community centers not state-funded so all the money we come up with is from donations. During Covid, our Meals on Wheels recipients tripled from 30-35 to 85-90 people. They went from getting meals five days a week to three days. All the money that gets donated is very helpful for the center. Most people we deliver to are very very grateful and we try to make as big of an impact on the holidays as we can to help those in need.”