You will all be pleased to know I survived my move this weekend, although I’m still living out of boxes and trying to figure out in which drawer I put hot mitts. The stability of my tornado of work brings me comfort in times like these.

While I never got a chance to get together a formal focus group, I spoke to enough people and we will move forward with our new “Giving” weekly feature that will appear in the Niles Daily Star, the Dowagiac Daily News, Edwardsburg Argus and Cassopolis Vigilant beginning next May 2.

The idea is to provide a place in our newspapers to give attention to community nonprofit and service organizations. We will include an event calendar, a wish list for donations and volunteers that may be needed, a timely feature and a question-and-answer with the volunteer of the week. This won’t work if you don’t tell us what is going on.

For starters, if you know someone who deserves the recognition for his or her volunteer work, please let me know the name, the kind of volunteering done and contact information. You can e-mail me at Michael.bennett@leaderpub.com or call me at (269) 687-7700.

While many volunteers don’t seek out recognition, we believe that featuring them and the work they do will help nudge others to also participate.

Also in our effort to bring our communities together, we launched “Neighborly” a few months ago, a feature celebrating the lives of those in our communities. It has been popular, although I need you to help spread the word about this free service.

“Neighborly” content comes from you. It is the place for news and pictures of your special life events, including birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, weddings and other interesting accomplishments.

Your community editor looks forward to this information and, like I said, it is free although limited by space. You may ask, “Who is my community editor?” Glad you asked. Your community editors are: for the Niles Daily Star, Craig Haupert; the Dowagiac Daily News, John Eby; and for the Cassopolis Vigilant and Edwardsburg Argus, Scott Novak. Find their contact information on page 4 of your newspaper.