A community came together for a day of service with around 500 volunteers that completed 20 service projects during Canyon Rim Cares on July 19.

“I have been doing this for 8 years,” Nate Gibby said. Gibby is the founder of Canyon Rim is Community which is the sponsor of this event.

Rare Disease Council members, Marian Furst, Justine Case, and Sylvia Lam work to bring awareness of rare diseases in Utah. (John S. Brown/Millcreek)

“Some projects are small like educational kits for different nonprofits serving schools or some  are big like the 5000 kits that the Granite School District is giving to second graders,” Gibby said. “These are kits that are just games that parents can play with kids at home.” The kit provides the parents teaching tools about the fundamentals to help the children catch up. “Last year we completed 4,000 kits for the Granite School District.”

Jennifer Millett is an early childhood specialist with Granite School district “This is the second grade kit. We saw the importance of having the parents involved and most of our parents were saying to us, ‘We want to help but we don’t know what to do’. So we started with kindergarten.”“We saw a huge improvement with kindergarten test scores. We heard from parents and teachers that the kids were working on the kits at home. There was even a video with a child and parent working together with a kit and that child got an award at the end of the year because that child was the most improved!”

“The kits will be delivered to all of the second grade kids in Granite School District. The kits have several games in both ELA and math and provide information on where your student should be in their grade,” Millett said. “Granite Education foundation helped get the funding to put these together.”

Children look at the CAWS puppies up for adoption during the Canyon Rim Cares event at Canyon Rim. (Rob Norbutt/Infinity Machine)

CAWS brought sweet fostered fur babies to be adopted. “We are an all foster, all volunteer rescue for dogs and cats. We rescue them from shelters, we get them vetted, spayed, neutered and ready for adoption. Today we are doing bracelets and pet portraits to give more attention to our animals” said Haylen, a volunteer from CAWS.

Some of the projects being worked on included stuffing backpacks for school age kids for the The Boys & Girls Club. The Birthday Box foundation assembled party supply kits so that kids in need could still celebrate their birthdays.

River clean-up kits were made for Jordan River Commission, sensory kits for The Children’s Center and supply kits for refugees for the Utah Refugee Connection were just some of the other projects volunteers worked on during the event. 

A mural painted on the wall in Canyon Rim Park will be seen by all that visit the park. “The mural is in honor of the patients of the rare disease community. Today we are painting the background and there will be likenesses of actual patients from our community right here in Utah that will be added to the mural. Our goal of this is to bring awareness to the rare disease community,” said Sylvia Lam from the Rare Disease Council.

Volunteers painted the mural on a wall in the Canyon Rim Park during Canyon Rim Cares. (Rob Norbutt/Infinity Machine)

An artist designed the mural and volunteers came by to help paint it. 

“I live in the neighborhood and I am a local artist,” Kaylee Rakowski said. “I come to this park every day. I am a landscape oil painter. It has been quite a treat and to have everyone help me. I really wanted this to be a space that is kind of zen.”

“The intent of Canyon Rim Cares is to develop a sense of community. When businesses, residences and nonprofits come together, miracles happen within a community. This is one of them. If we get our community to care about each other it makes a good community a great one,” Gibby said.