Kids are in action, painting the Community Giveaway House

Havre High School's Kids in Action have been busy after school this week, donating their time to fix up the Community Giveaway House.

The kids have been working at painting the house with the help of advisors Kay Nessland and Mary Wagner and painter Dave Heydon, who Nessland said saw them working on the house and volunteered to help out.

Earlier, Bruce Finneman's advanced construction class from Havre High was out installing new windows and doing work to fix the Giveaway House up. The work is a culmination of a project started last fall and winter, when the Kids in Action was formed to help the house out.

After reading a letter in The Havre Daily News from Sister Judith Meander that the Giveaway House needed help raising enough money to help needy people through the holidays, Nessland and Wagner decided it would be a good project for students at the high school. Nessland said she knew that many kids want to help out the community, but often don't know what they can do to help.

After the group was organized, they started collecting donations from the audiences at high school events. They not only met their goal of $2,000, they beat it by a considerable margin, raising more than $3,000.

They also tied in with Finneman's class at that time, buying material for the class to build two new collection bins for the house. The class designed new wooden bins, with a lid on top to make it easier to put donations in and a door on the front to make it easier to take them out, then spent a week in class building them.

The Giveaway House, located on North 11th Avenue in North Havre, was started about 30 years ago by Ann Friesen, and Ruth Nystrom. It collects donations, then distributes them to anyone who needs them at no charge.

The house collects just about anything people would need, Friesen said, including clothing, food baskets, furniture, kitchen and dining room items, bedding including hand-made quilts, and more.

Friesen said when the help was underway that it was greatly appreciated. She said the help the Kids in Action were giving was needed a great deal, and was helping the Giveaway House's service to no end.