Volunteers Step Out to Spruce Up Dixon Teen Center

With only a month to go before officially opening, the Dixon Teen Center located at 455 E. A Street got one last makeover Saturday as volunteers rolled up their sleeves and got down to business.

The cleanup kept volunteers from Recology Dixon and the community busy from 8 a.m., until about noon as the tidy list seemed endless but doable.

"To say the least it was a mess," said Scott Pardini, general manager, Recology in Dixon. "We cleaned out and recycled 9,000 pounds of material off of the stage and several hundred pounds of green waste that we moved out before we had the event day.  We came in a patched everything up and tried to prep everything for the day so we could get everything painted and done in one day."

Looking more like a construction site than the planned teen center, the campus was flooded with the sounds of pounding, drills, wood saws and 107 volunteers moving around as they worked.

Noel Parkhurst, 39, of Vacaville was painting the edge of the stage in the multipurpose room. He said that he enjoys helping out the community.

"Recology has a very good community program to help out and I'm glad to be a part of it," he said.

Others worked in teams outside creating gates and fencing from wood, cleaning up leaves and building benches. Volunteers for the event came from Marysville, Vallejo, San Francisco, Auburn and Dixon.

According to Cathy Morris, pastor at Dixon United Methodist Church who is also a member of the Dixon Teen Center Volunteer Committee, in February the committee started bringing together community leaders who felt it was time to create a teen center.

"We then began to go back to the community talking with other leaders, companies and organizations to see if they wanted to be part of the effort," Morris said. "In September we had a visioning workshop here in this room and Julia Lopez was a participant in that workshop along with about 25 teens from Dixon and 28 adults. We had various projects that we identified that we needed to work on in these next few months and our plan is to have our launch event on Jan. 22."

Julia Lopez, an employee of Recology Dixon, said she became involved in the project via a spearhead meeting.

"I was invited to a teen center spearhead meeting and they were talking about the teen center starting up here and getting volunteers organized to fix up this place for the teens," Lopez said. "It just happened to be at the same time that our company was looking for a volunteer project for somebody in need in the community. So from there, I approached my boss and he talked to the committee members and put this all together."

From cleaning to painting, the teen center is coming along but Morris said there will still be things to do like adding tables and chairs. Some things have already been donated like pool tables and Foosball tables.

For those who volunteered Saturday, the work and time put in was well worth it.

"I don't have a lot of money this year so I am doing it in other ways," said Kerry Kreuter, 56, of Vacaville. "Before, I donated a lot to charities. This is the first one I've done for Recology. It's a good idea. It's a positive thing." 

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