I often write and talk about the importance of all of us giving back to our communities.
Soon we will publish a weekly feature to help you find organizations that you may want to give your time and/or money.
If you have a catchy name for this feature please send it my way.
The concept will be to make this a universal feature that will publish in our newspapers serving Dowagiac, Edwardsburg, Cassopolis and Niles, as I firmly believe we all have common goals in our region.
When a non-profit organization has something of interest we will write a feature.
There will be a place for briefs describing equipment and volunteer needs.

You will also find a handy events calendar to see when there may be a fundraiser or a meeting time for an area service club.
I know service clubs are constantly looking for ways to attract new blood.
For a variety of reasons active membership has really fallen off in our area as it has in most of the country.
Many companies are running with a smaller than normal staff and are hesitant to allow employees even an hour to attend a lunch meeting.
Companies used to pay dues for their employees to join and those monies have dried up.
And sometimes I just wonder if there are too many people who think someone else will carry the weight.
There really isn’t enough “someone elses” out there to do the job.
We will begin a volunteer of the week feature to highlight those individuals who give of themselves.
Ultimately, I’d like to see this grow legs and develop a volunteer of the year event.
Certainly these people don’t help out for the attention. At the same time they are very deserving of the recognition.
None of this will happen without your help in developing the content and helping to select the volunteer of the week.
We are counting on you.
By the end of next week we expect to have a template built for the feature. Then we will invite a handful of people from area non-profit organizations to sit down and review our work to make certain we are going down the right path.
I hope to have this feature begin by the firstThursday in May.
As always, I welcome your feedback and ideas.
You can reach me at michael.bennett@leaderpub.com or (269) 687-7700.