On Saturday morning, hundreds of volunteers in Santa Maria will work together to build beds for local children in need.
The event will be a collaboration between two nonprofits in the area.
Since 2009, Pastor Carl Nielsen, the organizer of Serve Santa Maria, has led local volunteers twice a year on restoration projects at Santa Maria schools, painting over graffiti on local businesses, and general clean-up efforts around town.
“We got the paint, we got the snacks, we got the poles, so we are ready to take back our city,” Pastor Nielsen said.
For their next event, however, they will be joining forces with Colleen Grant and her team at the North Santa Barbara County chapter of Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
“Serve Santa Maria has been around for many, many years. They do their projects twice a year and get hundreds of volunteers,” said Colleen Grant, co-president of the nonprofit. “So it is great for us to be a part of it to maybe get more volunteers to help with our projects throughout the year.”
Last summer, KSBY was introduced to Grant ahead of their bed-building event at the Lompoc Home Depot. On Saturday, she and Pastor Nielsen are inviting people to come out to the Home Depot in Santa Maria to help them build at least 50 more.
Grant says since she began leading local bed-building efforts, her team has distributed free beds to nearly 800 kids, two of those being Yussel Pecero’s son and daughter.
“Lately,, everything is so expensive. Beds are so expensive, there is little work, and we didn’t have a sufficient space to sleep altogether,” Pecero said.
Pecero says before she applied to receive a bunk bed from Sleep in Heavenly Peace, her children slept in the same bed as her because they couldn’t afford individual ones.
She says now, her son and daughter have beds that were hand delivered by Grant. Pecero will be joining the volunteer efforts on Saturday.
“Tomorrow, we will build our 1000th bed. We have delivered 788 beds locally,” Grant told KSBY.
Despite their ongoing efforts, Grant says the demand for beds has only shot up in the past year as they currently have more than 200 children on their wait-list.
While Serve Santa Maria volunteers will be helping Grant build beds on Saturday, Pastor Carl Nielsen says more than a dozen other community projects will also be taking place throughout the city.
“We are serving in our parks. We are planting trees at Minami Park, spreading wood-chips at Preisker Park,” he said. “We are doing two schools out in Sisquoc and the supplies here are at Robert Bruce Elementary School.”
Those interested in helping build beds or volunteering with other Serve Santa Maria projects on Saturday are invited to come out to the Home Depot north parking lot between 8:30 and 9 a.m.
Grant says the Santa Maria Home Depot covered the entire cost of the wood needed to build the beds.
