Young Volunteer Enjoys Quilt Garden Experience

Carissa Renner—of Wakarusa—is always looking for opportunities to get her son Chad, 14, more active and involved in the community.

So when she saw a social media post, several months ago, about opportunities to volunteer and help out with the annual Wakarusa Quilt Garden—it was a bonafide no-brainer.

“Chad loves gardening, and being outside,” said Carissa. “He wants to go into the IT field when he’s older, but gardening is something he’s always done and enjoyed. He and his brother Mark have both been gardening since they were a young age—helping to plant and grow tomatoes and flowers.”

Mom knows best

Carissa had a feeling that helping out with the Wakarusa Quilt Garden would be a good opportunity for Chad to get involved, and spread his wings, and—in yet another example of the proverbial adage, Mom Knows Best—mom was right.

“It was a lot of fun to work with other people in my community, I really enjoyed planting the marigolds—that was my favorite,” said young Chad of the experience. “It’s a good feeling to work with new people, and when I was helping out with the Wakarusa Quilt Garden it felt like I was giving back to my community.”

“Not only did he love the actual gardening work, he also had a lot of interactions that were healthy—even cross-generational—learning and growing experiences,” said Carissa. “It was a fabulous experience for Chad. He met and worked with new people, and at one point he spent a lot of time helping an older man in his 80s with a good amount of planting. They were working together, the man would put plants in the ground and Chad would wait and then cover the plants with soil.”

That was a proud moment for Carissa, a homeschool mom and a longtime quilting enthusiast.

“I’m a quilter, I did it in 4-H, and I’ve always loved the quilt gardens,” said Carissa. “The fact that the quilt gardens are designed with actual patterns has always been fascinating to me. The Wakarusa Quilt Garden is pretty special to us, and we also like to go to look at the quilt gardens at the Elkhart County Fair. It was just really nice to be involved with the quilt garden together, and to see my son have such a good experience.”

Volunteering can bring people together

Of all the positive outcomes from the experience, there is one that is still playing out all these weeks later. Volunteering at the Wakarusa Quilt Garden gave Carissa and Chad the chance to spend time together—as Mother and Son—serving their community and, also, finding new things to talk about and share with each other.

“After helping out with the Wakarusa Quilt Garden, I started paying a lot more attention and noticing some of the other quilt gardens in our area,” said Chad. “And my mom and I would talk about all the planning and care that must have gone into those gardens. We’d talk about some of the similarities we’d see in those gardens to the quilt gardens we helped with in Wakarusa.”

Sometimes, volunteering and community service helps more than just an organization, or community segment—sometimes volunteering also helps the volunteers themselves.

“It was such a good experience helping with the Wakarusa Quilt Garden,” said Chad, “and I’m glad my mom helped me to be a part of it.”