On June 19th, the whole Rox crew arrived bright and early at the Kinship Center in Santa Ana in our toughest work clothes to literally clean house. (One of our creative director’s husbands even showed up to help with some of the heavy stuff – Thanks, Ed.) This wonderful nonprofit agency is dedicated to finding loving, stable homes for children from birth to age 17, and has helped create and support families for thousands of children since 1984. We were so humbled by the dedication of everyone there.

After getting the warmest of welcomes by staff and fed a delicious continental breakfast, we broke off into teams to scrub bathrooms and kitchen facilities, reorganize closets, haul unwanted items off to dumpsters and just generally clean up anything needing it. You see, the Kinship Center doesn’t have a budget for this kind of cleaning, so much more important tasks take priority and they just live with the things that don’t get done.

By the time we left, things were in ship-shape condition, and the staff was speechless. I guess you could say we’re pretty damn good at getting down and dirty, and in all modesty a whole lot more thorough than those big bucks cleaning services.

For more info on Kinship Center, visit kinshipcenter.org. They can use all the help they can get!

This year, Rox has launched a program called Service Rox. The overall program is for the good of our clients, our friends and our community. This section is dedicated to our quarterly philanthropic adventures. Each quarter, we put a team of 3 together to plan a community service event and this quarter, we served, and I mean SERVED, on January 21, MLK Day. The lot of us hauled our buns down to the Volunteer Center Orange County in Garden Grove and packed food boxes for the hungry. Now, many of us had never done this type of service before, so packing food boxes didn’t sound too difficult, but I am here to tell you that we got whooped and it felt good, mind, body and soul. It was hard work and well worth it. Our line packed nearly 1,200 food boxes that day, more than double the other food lines during our shift, time well spent. I highly recommend that everybody give community service a try, you’ll want to do it again and again.

For more information on Volunteer Center Orange County, visit their website at www.volunteercenter.org.