volunteering – Serving Stories

Creating Community in Lisbon

Redux, Episode 11

This week, we are re-issuing our very first episode— from a Community Dinner in Lisbon in 2019! Although some of the people running the dinner have changed since this episode aired, the Community Dinners continue to go strong, since their inauguration in 2011.

The Community Dinners are a flagship project of Serve the City Portugal and occur once or twice a month in every city where they are active. In these dinners, one group of volunteers cooks a three-course meal while another group welcomes guests from all kinds of marginalized groups: people experiencing homelessness, elderly people, disabled people, and more. Still another group of volunteers—usually from a corporation, a school or a church—sets up the tables and serves the meal. This group usually is the one funding the dinner for the evening. And finally, there is a group of volunteers who eat at the tables with the guests and facilitate conversation.

It is a most inspiring project and we hope you enjoy this re-issue! If you do, you might want to look back and go through some of our other old issues… And if you want to see some pictures of the recent Community Dinners, visit STC Lisbon’s Instagram page.

Listen to the episode here:

For more episodes featuring STC Lisbon, listen to: Friendly Neighbourhood Heroes and These Mugs are Green!

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 10

Batman once said: “Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight.”

Batman knew what he was talking about, having transformed the trauma he endured as 10-year-old Bruce Wayne of seeing his parents murdered in front of him. In becoming Batman, he took that suffering and shaped it into a motivation to bring justice to his city.

Asylum seekers, one of the main groups of people Serve the City supports around the world, have by definition suffered trauma in their home countries—and they may continue to suffer in their journey toward safety and assure status. But we believe that as we build relationships with refugees—not out of pity but recognizing they also have something to give—we can invite them into our community as volunteers, allowing them to transform that suffering into successful serving.

In this episode, we visit STC Cork in Ireland, on the very first project of their city relaunch! There, in an accommodation centre for asylum seekers, volunteers begin the process of befriending residents, while inviting them to share their talents in cooking food from their home cultures. We also meet Abdul and Safi, two Serve the City employees who also happen to be refugees! They share how serving has transformed them, and is transforming other refugees around them.

Listen to this episode here:

We were privileged to be at the very first project initiated by STC Cork in Ireland this November! Pictured here are City Leaders Ernie and Brandon Treu (in the gray STC sweatshirts). From the right are Ronan Coffey (STC Ireland director), Shannon Deal (Serving Stories producer) and Leontine Mastenbroek (Ronan’s wife and longtime STCI board member).

And in the middle of the picture is a surprise guest at the project: Cork’s Deputy Lord Mayor, Honore Kamegni! This was particularly significant because the project took place at an accommodation centre for asylum seekers… and Counsellor Kamegni first came to Ireland as an asylum seeker himself, 22 years ago. Now he is the first person of colour to serve on Cork City Council. It was a great honor for Serve the City Cork to be recognized by this man who has transformed his own suffering from persecution in Cameroon into service for his adopted country of Ireland.

(Unfortunately, our audio of this visit did not turn out well, so we did not include it in the episode… but we wanted to include it here!)

Brandon and Ernie Treu, the Cork City Leaders, are experienced children/youth workers, and they had planned all sorts of games and fun activities for the children at the centre. Their teenage kids, Silas and Ethan, accompanied them as volunteers on the project. Brandon is also a professional puppeteer, and in his alternate persona as “Andy,” he and Ernie helped kids think about what it means to be a friend. This was the theme of the evening, as volunteers and residents got to know one another and began to make friends.

Below is a little taste of “Andy” and Ernie’s presentation about being friends!

We do not have any photos of the residents, as the centre’s rules prohibited us from taking any pictures of them (even from the back). So you will have to just imagine the crowd, and the smells of delicious food the residents made to share—food representing the countries they came from! Inviting residents to share their food was a good way to start out by recognizing that they also have something to share! Transformation takes place as people are given the opportunity to give!

Meet Abdul Assaad, a Syrian refugee who now works for Serve the City Luxembourg. We talked to Abdul at the European Forum and found out that he found STC because he was looking for a way to give back to his new country. Abdul talked to us about how he has seen love build bridges that cross dividing lines.

Here you can see Abdul leading two STC Luxembourg projects transforming lives in the city: working with children at a refugee centre and street kindness to people living homeless. These are just two of the projects that he mentioned he has partnered with; you can also hear about some of the environmental projects he has been part of in our episode called Environment: Gotta Clean Up This City!

Here is Abdul at the European Forum in Berlin with his City Leader Nicolas Duprey (at left) and Florent Brunet (middle), the STC Lux treasurer. Unfortunately, due to the current European political backlash against refugees and immigrants, the government program that helped support Abdul to work full-time for STC Luxembourg has ended since our interview with him. Nonetheless, he remains a team leader there and he is now spending more time studying to improve his facility with local languages. Let’s hope things change and people start to realize how much people like Abdul has to offer to society!

I believe that if I want to love this country and start to have it like a real home, I need to give back. We love who we give to. So I start to give first, and it’s not a secret that I start to love the country.
Abdul Assaad

Find out more about Serve the City Luxembourg HERE.

This is Safi Taha, pictured at our European Forum in Berlin. Safi is an Afghan refugee who now works for Serve the City Paris, seeking to create programs and partnerships that will transform the lives of other asylum seekers and refugees. We first met Safi a year ago when he told us his story in “Compassion: Nourishing Change through Kindness.”

Two ways Safi seeks to transform the lives of asylum seekers are: 1) inviting them to join a weekly Language and Culture Exchange hosted by Serve the City Paris (at left), and 2) inviting them to become a regular part of the STC volunteer community by joining a food outreach project (right). After three months of regular attendance at these programs, asylum seekers are given a recommendation letter that can help with their appeal… and Safi says that 90% of the guys who complete the program are granted refugee status!

But that is not all… many of the guys continue to join in the projects because they now feel they belong to a new community in France. Safi here represents STC Paris at the Town Hall at an event concerning the city’s winter plan for people on the streets. Safi’s own life was transformed through volunteering, and he works hard to transform the lives of others like himself!

Disadvantaged people, they think maybe they think that they don’t have money, so they have no value in the society. But when they come to volunteer, they feel they have value in the society. They have the ability, they find their capacity, and unconsciously they become happy when they feel that they did something nice that day.
Safi Taha

See more about Serve the City Paris HERE.

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 9

“This looks like a job for Superman!” On the old TV show, whenever someone was stuck in an impossible situation—balanced on the edge of a collapsing building, or stuck under fallen rubble—this is what they would say! Superman himself, when asked why the world needed superheroes, said, “To catch them when they fall.”

This is what volunteers from Serve the City Ireland are doing as they offer a new start to people in difficulty through DIY and decluttering projects. Often, these are people who not only are struggling with some kind of disability or illness (physical or mental), but are also isolated and in a situation where their home environment has become unmanageable. As social workers and other key community players alert them to the situation, STC volunteers can come in and clean up gardens, do home repairs, or remove junk from their houses to give them a new start!

Listen to the episode here:

We went along with a Serve the City Dublin DIY team one Saturday morning in November, where they were giving a new start to a disabled man who goes by the name of Loxie (back left), by clearing out his garden. Leading the team was Dick Burke (front left) who has been heading DIY projects for the past 12 years and is also on the STC board. The rest of the team are Eugene and Michaela, both long-term STC volunteers, and Samir, who was volunteering for the first time!

Loxie, who used to be a bicycle courier before his disability, became a bit of an Internet sensation because of his dog, Zai. Zai first started climbing into his courier bag to go with him on his rounds… and then worked his way up to riding around on Loxie’s shoulder!

This picture is just one from Zai’s Instagram feed, which has over 25,000 followers! Follow the link for more cute photos.

These days, however, Loxie is suffering from a rare type of muscular dystrophy—a disease that is both debilitating and terminal. He was also alone, and did not have the help needed to “get on top of his garden” as he put it. This is job for Superman… I mean Serve the City!

The volunteers made short work of trimming the ivy and bushes, digging out weeds, and getting rid of clutter in the garden. Now Zai the dog has a place to run and play and Loxie has a new start with a more manageable garden! He also was a beneficiary of the goodie boxes that STC volunteers distributed at Christmas with personally signed cards… you can hear about this in our episode Generosity: What You Can See Out Wenceslas’ Window.

DIY projects on the outside of people’s houses eventually led to some clients allowing STC Dublin volunteers to declutter the insides of their houses. This photograph was taken by Ronan Coffey, STC Ireland director, and it captures some of the sense of despair that goes along with a long-term habit of hoarding. Without help, there is no way a person in this situation is going to be able to escape the trap they find themselves in. This is when volunteers can really help by offering a new start.

These pictures and the one above are from a house featured in a story told by Barry Enright at our Serving Stories Live event that led us to investigate STC Dublin’s work clearing out the houses of people suffering from hoarder syndrome. To do these projects, the team members wear hazmat suits, and Barry told us that they had to put special gel inside their masks to cover up the smell insidee.

This man living in this house was found by police after they broke down the door when his neighbour reported a lack of response to her knocking. He was very ill, and was sent to hospital, but when social services saw the state of the house, they refused to send him home. Eventually, social services called Serve the City Dublin to come help clear out the house so the man would be able to return from hospital. Volunteers filled four large skips—trash containers six metres long and two metres high—with the rubbish they took from the house.

Ronan and Barry told us that one of the commonalities for people in these situations are that they are isolated, not having family and friends or not allowing those they had into the house. Another commonality is often that there is some stressful situation that triggers the hoarding behavior, such as a death or divorce. It takes time for such a hoard to accumulate, often 20-40 years; thus, clearing it out gives the person a chance for a new start in a clean environment.

This video shows the work going on in the house as the team was clearing it out. This work would enable this man to make a new start from a new baseline when he returned from the hospital, with neighbours now to help him.

Below is the team that worked for two days on the house Barry told us about: Eugene and Dick, who were also on the DIY project above, and Barry and Ronan. Because of the hazards involved in this particular situation, all of these were experienced volunteers who had done these projects before.

We never know exactly what the final outcome is, but at least we hope that we have ignited some little spark, some way forward. They can then move on with their lives and see the difference and realize the impossible situation that they’ve been in, and that they’ve been shown a way. And that there are people who listen and care and can help.
Ronan Coffey, STC Ireland Director

This is a much-loved page from a Superman comic, in which he rescues a teenager who is about to jump to their death, not by swooping in and catching them, but by encouraging them. He says: “It’s never as bad as it seems. You’re much stronger than you think you are. Trust me.“

When we try to provide a new start for someone, this is the message that we want to share with then, as we help free them from a burden they have been carrying alone.

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 8

“I never thought I would be able to do this stuff—but I can. Anyone can wear the mask.” This is what Miles Morales, a 16-year-old Spiderman, says in the movie Into the Spider-Verse. In it, the original Spiderman, Peter Parker, becomes his mentor not only for his abilities but also for his compassion toward others.

(You can view this part of the movie at the bottom of our post HERE. You too can wear the mask!)

We also find that volunteering offers an excellent milieu for mentoring others, as we find out in this week’s episode, centred on the Community Kitchen (a close partner of Serve the City Brussels). These mentees may be young people, as is the case with Aline. She is now the CK Operations Manager, but was formerly a teenage volunteer who did Serve the City projects with her youth group. Or they may be people in vulnerable situations, who find support as they engage in volunteering… and perhaps also find a new future waiting for them!

We also explore the risks and benefits of this kind of mentoring in discussion with Gayl Russell, the Community Kitchen founder, and Rev. Annie Bolger, chaplain at Holy Trinity Anglican Church where the Community Kitchen operates. You will be inspired in developing and mentoring your own volunteers as you listen!

Listen to the episode here:

Here we see staff from the Community Kitchen taking a well-earned break while out at the Brussels Christmas market together! In front is Aline, the first person we meet in this episode; on the left is Roya, another of our featured interviewees. Completing the group are Anjali and Akkara (who was in our last episode, Partnerships: Activists, Assemble! )

Aline’s journey to working in the social sector began when she was a teenager in a youth group led by Nathan Torrini, now the leader of Serve the City Belgium. Nathan involved the youth group in Serve the City Big Volunteer Days, and also the Big Volunteer Week in the summer. Aline recounted how she got involved in a community garden, painting a social centre, and distributing food on the streets. She also became a leader in the youth group, mentoring other young people into volunteering. She said:

“We tried to to encourage the young people in Brussels to discover that there are a lot of needs in Brussels. Not all the needs are far away from us. I mean, there are needs everywhere in a lot of countries, but also in our city there are a lot of people who just need a small helping hand.”

Later, Aline became an intern with Serve the City Brussels, working with her mentor Nathan. In the picture above, Aline (in green coat) is leading a food outreach project in Louvain-la-Neuve, a city just outside Brussels.

Gradually, Aline found she had a passion and a vocation for working in the social sector. She took a part-time job with Fedasil, the Belgian Federal government body that manages the process for asylum seekers. She started this job when the Ukraine war sent many Ukrainians all over Europe seeking asylum; now, she works primarily with unaccompanied minors, children and teenagers who have come to Belgium alone.

When Aline began looking for a second part-time job in the social sector, she learned through Serve the City of an opening at the Community Kitchen. Now she is Operations Manager at the Community Kitchen, coordinating the volunteers and employees so that they can meet the demands of the project for which they provide meals. And she in turn can impact volunteers that come by helping them understand how they can can offer “a small helping hand.”

We also talked to Roya, who came to Europe ten years ago from Iran. After spending two years in Greece and four years trying to get to England, she was finally caught by the police in Belgium and applied for asylum. However, her application was turned down, and she ended up on the streets for some time.

Eventually, she found help from Oasis, a Serve the City partner that works with people who have been trafficked or exploited, or who are vulnerable to exploitation. They were working with Serve the City in an initiative called “The Trampoline Project” which helped vulnerable women find a way back into employment, mentoring them through training and volunteering. And when they found out she had experience in cooking, they recommended that she volunteer with the Community Kitchen!

We did an episode about this last season, featuring a short interview with Roya! The episode is called, Courage: Dreaming New Dreams in the Big City

If you want to to learn more about Oasis Brussels, you can find more info HERE.

One of Roya’s big goals was to get out of her exploitative living situation into safe housing. The founder of the Community Kitchen, Gayl Russell, offered Roya to come and live in her house. This is taking mentoring to a whole new level! At the time of the interview, Roya had been living with Gayl almost three years. Gayl talked about how welcoming Roya into her home was not a simple decision, but also how it had helped her to grow as she also learned through mentoring and hosting Roya.

In this picture, Gayl and Roya pose with St. Nicholas, played by Mahmoud, another STC project leader who is also a Syrian refugee, in December 2023. They are celebrating because Roya had finally received her papers to live and work in Belgium! The Community Kitchen had testified to her diligent and dependable work as a chef, and she was finally recognized as a member of the Brussels community. And now she was an employee of the Community Kitchen too!

When we did the interview in November 2024, Roya had just signed a contract for her own apartment—a dream of hers for many years. Finally, after 10 years, she is able to start a new life—thanks to the mentoring and support that she received from Gayl and the Community Kitchen team!

And now, the promised movie clip from Into the Spider-Verse. You too can wear the mask!

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 7

“Earth’s Mightiest Heroes!” This is how the superhero team of the Avengers is known. Each one of them—Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and the Black Widow (shown at right), among others—has their own special powers and abilities. But in partnership with the others on the team, together they are unstoppable!

The same is true when Serve the City partners with local charities and social services to create projects that could not happen without the partnership. The non-profits and social services have access to the big issues in the city and the people affected by them; but Serve the City has the ability to mobilize volunteers that maximize the work the partners are doing.

In this episode, we see how Serve the City Brussels partners closely with the Community Kitchen, a non-profit that was started by an STC volunteer, Gayl Russell, in the kitchen of Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Together, the Community Kitchen now makes over 5000 meals a week that are distributed to hungry people by Serve the City volunteers in other project partner charities. And the Community Kitchen also benefits from Serve the City Brussels sending it hundreds of volunteers a week through its ServeNow app.

Listen to the episode here:

Gayl Russell is the founder of the Community Kitchen, which started just prior to COVID to help create food for various food outreach projects. Gayl had been a volunteer at La Phare, a twice weekly sit-down meal for homeless people hosted by the Salvation Army and manned by STC volunteers. As she tried to prepared meals for 150 people in the tiny kitchen there, she thought about the huge industrial kitchen at her church, Holy Trinity Anglican, and she approached them to see if they would let them prepare food there.

The answer was yes! And with the pandemic, the need for takeaway meals grew as soup kitchens and shelters shut their doors. At the time, the Community Kitchen became particularly known for its muffins, part of the breakfasts served to people on the streets. You can see Gayl here with some of the famous muffins!

During the pandemic, we made an episode about this called Compassion, Courage and Coronavirus featuring these food projects that you might enjoy.

On the first day we visited the Community Kitchen, they welcomed a guest chef from the US State Department’s Culinary Corps. (We joked that if this really were the Avengers, this partner would be Captain America!) Chef Kevin Tian has his own highly rated restaurant called Moon Rabbit in Washington DC, but today he is making chickpea stew in the Community Kitchen.

In the middle picture, Chef Kevin is with Aline, the Operations Manager and Akra, the Kitchen Manager, both employees of the Community Kitchen. Aline and Akra welcome and manage the STC volunteers that come to help each day. Each week they produce over 5000 meals which are delivered by STC volunteers to other non-profits (such as the Humanitarian Hub, in partnership with the Red Cross)… where further STC volunteers will serve them to hungry people.

Virtually all of the food produced by the Community Kitchen is vegan, as this allows for most of the dietary restrictions of the clients (people who eat halal, for example. However, Akra told us that they vary the dishes every day, changing up the vegetables and carbohydrates used, so that the meals are not bland or boring.

Nathan Torrini, Marie Bennett, and Jeremie Malengreaux make up the Executive Team of Serve the City Brussels. In the episode, we said that if this partnership were the Avengers, Nathan would be Nick Fury, because as Executive Director he is the one who manages the project partnerships with other non-profits and social services (calling the Avengers to assemble!) Nathan told us that he has many more inquiries from other potential partner organizations who want to add value to their operations through STC volunteer teams.

Jeremie is the author of the ServeNow app, which is used by Brussels to recruit, register and organize volunteers on projects. (Jeremie was not surprised when we identified him with the techno-savvy Avenger Tony Stark in the episode!) The ServeNow app has been a game-changer in terms of mobilization, and is now beginning to be used by other STC cities (e.g. Paris, Dublin and Lisbon). Aline, the Operations Manager at the Community Kitchen, said:

We always know how many people we’ll have for the volunteers. They can just cancel their shift if something happened and they cannot come. So we have a really good track of who will be there to help. It’s really way easier, in the partnership with the volunteers. I can’t imagine how we would run this project without the ServeNow app.
Aline, Community Kitchen

Below is a video about the ServeNow app:

We visited the Community Kitchen again on a Tuesday when it was running its weekly Food Bank. This is done in partnership with L’Olivier, a social and legal assistance non-profit for refugees. Each week, about 80-90 people wait their turn to choose six items from a minimum of twelve non-perishable foodstuffs. While they are waiting, volunteers serve coffee, tea and cookies for free from the church coffee bar, and afterwards, people are welcome to eat or take home a meal from the Community Kitchen.

Our guides at the Food Bank were Annie Bolger and Chris DeFortis (below). Annie is one of the chaplains at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, which still hosts the Community Kitchen although it is now an independent non-profit, and she acts as the church liaison. Chris, though he works full-time at NATO, founded L’Olivier in 1992; it was one of STC Brussels’ first partnerships when it started almost 20 years ago.

If you want to learn more about the Community Kitchen, here’s an article from the Brussels Times.

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 5

Saints were the superheroes of the medieval world. So this Christmas on Serving Stories, we remember one of these saints, remembered each Christmas for his compassion, generosity, and willingness to forsake his own comfort to provide for someone else in need. The saint we are talking about is remembered in a carol as Good King Wenceslas.

In actual fact, Wenceslas was not a king, but a Duke in old Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) in the 10th century. He was well-known for his kindness and generosity to the poor. One of his early biographers wrote about him:

“Rising every night from his noble bed, with bare feet and only one chamberlain, he went around to God’s churches and gave alms generously to widows, orphans, those in prison and afflicted by every difficulty, so much so that he was considered, not a prince, but the father of all the wretched.”
Cosmas of Prague

The English carol about “Good King Wenceslas” was taken from a book of children’s stories about saints by the hymnwriter John Mason Neale in 1853. It tells how Wenceslas, looking out his window on the day after Christmas, noticed a poor man gathering sticks for a fire. After asking where the man lived, he went himself out in the snow, along with his page, to bring the man food and fuel. When the page became cold pushing through the snow, Wenceslas invited him to follow in his own boot prints, and he would find himself warmed. The carol ends:

Therefore, men and women, be sure,
grace and wealth possessing,
you that now will bless the poor
shall yourselves find blessing.
John Mason Neale

In this week’s episode, we discover how many volunteers in cities all over the world are walking in Wenceslas’ bootprints in this Christmas season. Having noticed people less fortunate than themselves out their windows, they are sharing generosity at some cost to themselves. Our primary story focuses on Serve the City Berlin, and a massive gift distribution to more than 2000 refugee children, but we also visit four other STC cities—Amsterdam, Dublin, Eldoret, and the Virginia Peninsula—to see what generosity looks like in those places.

Serving Stories host Ani Deal and sound designer/composer Parker Deal were together recently in the USA, and they recorded “Good King Wenceslas” together! (The reason their voices blend so well is that they are brother and sister!) You can listen to the whole carol below.

Christmas Generosity

Serve the City Berlin (Germany)

Our principal story in this episode features Serve the City Berlin, where over 100 volunteers, including employees from eight different companies, packed over 2400 Christmas packages for refugee children in 23 Berlin shelters. The gifts were designed for different age groups in consultation with shelter leaders, and distributed at the various shelter Christmas parties. That’s a lot of generosity!

Pictured above is STC Berlin City Leader Christine Thumm, along with Core Team member Melinda Means, packing Christmas gifts in the space generously made available to them every year by a local refugee shelter for this project. This is the tenth year STC Berlin has served refugee children in this way.

This episode centers on a particular day when the volunteers wrapping presents not only included employees of a recruitment agency but also elderly people in a retirement home. The corporate volunteers, a team of 11 from Kummer Consulting, had the generosity to transport all the materials to the home so that the residents could also take part in the project. William Whittenberg, a member of the STC Berlin Core Team, acted as Serving Stories’ roving reporter to interview the participants (in picture at left).

Two of the residents, Frau Alin and Frau Fank, allowed William to interview them. We were struck that some of these elderly residents had some commonalities with the children for whom they were wrapping gifts: they had experienced war and loss during their childhood.

In putting together the script for the episode, producer Shannon Deal recruited the help of a German friend, Ulrike Truderung, to translate the interviews. Ulrike also had some insights that might not have been obvious just by reading the transcripts. If you are interested to follow this conversation, you can read the transcript of it HERE.

If you want to hear some other stories from STC Berlin, listen to Humility: Mopping Mayors and Stumbling Stones and Serving Stories – Episode 1.3 – Berlin, DE.

Serve the City Amsterdam (Netherlands)

Serve the City Amsterdam demonstrated generosity to undocumented families living in the city by inviting Amsterdammers to create a “Reverse Advent Box.” Normally, you take 24 gifts for yourself from an Advent box, but in this case people were invited to put in specific items from their own house to make it possible for someone else to celebrate Christmas. Above, you can see some of the donated boxes; at right is the “Reverse Advent Calendar” list.

If you want to find out more about the “Reverse Advent” initiative, check it out HERE.

Volunteers in Amsterdam also served children living in refugee shelters by distributing presents to them for Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas’ Day), on December 6. This is the traditional time when children in the Netherlands receive their gifts during the holiday season.

If you want to hear some other stories from STC Amsterdam, listen to Environment: Gotta Clean Up This City! and Hope: Everyone’s Got Talent!

Serve the City Dublin (Ireland)

Ronan Coffey, STC Ireland director (standing at right), told us about a project of generosity extended to the elderly and disabled clients of STC Dublin who over the years have been helped through DIY and decluttering projects in their homes.

In conjunction with employees from the French power company EDF, volunteers packed boxes full of Christmas goodies: cookies, chocolates, chips, and Christmas crackers, among other things. But the most important addition to the boxes was a handwritten Christmas card, personally addressed to the client. For some of the recipients this might have been the only Christmas greeting they received this year. Below are volunteers and EDF employees with some of the fruits of their labors.

If you want to hear other stories from STC Dublin, listen to Compassion: A Hundred Thousand Welcomes and COVID Kindness – Episode 1 – When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.

Serve the City Peninsula (VA, USA)

STC Peninsula also chose to show generosity to elderly clients with whom they already had a relationship. Every month, volunteers go to play bingo with residents at Spratley House and Ash Manor, two low-income senior living facilities. At left, Cindy Hahne, STC Peninsula City Leader, oversees the packing of gift bags for residents, including handmade white boards that volunteers wrote positive messages on.

After packing the bags, volunteers went door to door to personally deliver their goodies!

If you want to hear some other stories from STC Peninsula, listen to Love: Kindness Wherever You Look! and Humility: Mopping Mayors and Stumbling Stones.

We also interviewed STC City Leader Leah Ngugi from Eldoret, Kenya. Her “Good King Wenceslas” project is making tortillas for street people, which will take place Christmas Day. If you want to hear a story from Eldoret, listen to Stand Up to Villains.

Serve Like a Superhero: Season 3, Episode 4

Pretty much every superhero’s goal is to clean up their city! Usually this means putting the bad guys in jail… but there are people serving like superheroes who have taken this task more literally, and are looking to clean up the environment in their city.

The superhero for this episode is Captain Planet, the star of a cheesy 90s Saturday morning cartoon, complete with green mullet hairdo! Despite low budget animation and silly villain names, this show encouraged kids to care about cleaning up their environment, and the power of doing it together.

(You can watch the intro to this retro gem HERE.)

In this episode of Serving Stories, we follow our own Planeteers from STC Amsterdam, STC Luxembourg, and STC Wavre (Belgium) on different innovative environmental initiatives to save the planet!

Innovative Environmental Volunteering

Instead of presenting today’s episode, our regular Serving Stories host, Ani Deal, is one of the featured participants in it! (Producer Shannon Deal steps in as host for this week.) For the last two years, when Ani wasn’t presenting podcasts, she worked as an Amsterdam tour guide leading visitors around the city. In this picture, she is guiding a group around Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter on an Anne Frank tour. But the tour in this episode is quite different…

Ani is leading this group of employees from the Dutch company Adyen on a Trash Tour in Vondel Park, in downtown Amsterdam. This environmental project involves two aspects: an actual tour of the park, and cleaning up trash as they find it. In their hands, volunteers hold trash bingo cards for keeping track of the types of trash they find.

As you can see in the middle picture, the Adyen team had a ton of trash to clean up… especially cigarette butts! But eventually they were able to dump all the many bits of rubbish they found with a sense of accomplishment that they had made a difference in the city environment. (Adyen’s environmental goals as a company can be found here.)

The Trash Tour is a regular environmental project of STC Amsterdam! Here are a few other corporate teams that have participated… The park is kept cleaner because of the efforts of all these multiple teams. As we always say in Serve the City: Many people doing small things together can make a big difference!

(If you want to listen to another Serving Stories episode featuring STC Amsterdam, check out Hope: Everyone’s Got Talent!)

STC Luxembourg is another community that has numerous environmental initiatives. City Leader Nicolas Duprey told us about the continuous clean-up projects they have all over the country. At right and below are Nicolas and his team on World Cleanup Day, when they also worked to gather 40 000 cigarette butts! You can see that in addition to collecting it, they have also separated the trash so it can be recycled.

STC Luxembourg partners with a local company called Shime, that has a project called MéGO! (“Megot” is the word for “cigarette butt” in French.) They collect cigarette butts—which are largely made of plastice, surprisingly, and depollute them. They then transform the butts into park benches! Incredible, right? (You can check out their project HERE.)

Below, Nicolas and his team are doing environmental awareness raising project for MéGO! including handing out free plastic ashtrays made out of recycled cigarette butts (the little round packages on the right side photo).

We also heard about an award-winning piece of trash art created by STC Luxembourg, pictured below! This whale is created out of thousands of discarded cigarette butts and plastic trash, to highlight the fact that 80% of the pollutants in our ocean environment originate on the land.

(If you want to hear another Serving Stories episode featuring STC Luxembourg (and Christmas!), listen to Respect: In the Stockings of Saint Nicholas from Season 2.)

Serve the City Wavre, just south of Brussels in Belgium, has developed a partnership with the environmental association Aer Aqua Terra, devoted to cleaning up the river Dyle. (You can read more—in French—about this association HERE.) The association provides the water gear and tools, and the volunteers provide the manpower.

Volunteers use tools to dig out refuse embedded in the river bed and sort it on a small boat that they tow along with them. Sorting the rubbish makes it much easier to recycle.

At the end of the action, volunteers bring back the refuse to be recycled. The most common objects found in the river are wet wipes that have been flushed down someone’s toilet. Few people know that the vast majority of wet wipes are made with plastic and are not biodegradable. Sewer overflows sweep these wipes into rivers, and the volunteers retrieve buckets full of them on every cleaning. (You can read more about the environmental wet wipes problem in this article.)

And now… the promised link to the intro of Captain Planet! The power is yours!

Serving SHORT Stories!

On this page, you will find links to all our mini-episodes we call Serving SHORT Stories!

Serving SHORT Stories 13: Moving the Needle

May 23, 2025: In these two little stories about creating beauty in the surroundings of people in need, Carlton Deal, the founder of Serve the City, emphasizes how simple projects can move the needle in people’s lives… and help them perhaps to see their own beauty.

Serving SHORT Stories 12: From Privilege to Purpose

May 8, 2025: Giving time to volunteering can change the course of your life! That’s what happened to Nicolo Sgreva, the representative for the UPS Foundation in Europe. In this story, Nicolo tells us how volunteering around the world led him into his present job, and how he sees volunteering benefiting his UPS colleagues.

Serving SHORT Stories 11: A Celebration of Dignity

April 24, 2025: This heartwarming story comes from our very first podcast episode, set at a Community Dinner in Lisbon in April 2019. A young volunteer came up with a creative way to support the Community Dinners, that also caused people often treated as worthless to see the dignity in themselves.

Serving SHORT Stories 10: Giving Back to Move Forward

April 10, 2025: Early on, Serve the City had to learn the lesson that people in need were also people with something to give! Shannon Deal, the producer of Serving Stories, tells how a group of Afghan migrants in Brussels helped teach us the valuable lesson that volunteering is for everyone—no matter their situation.

Serving SHORT Stories 9: The Kindness of Strangers

March 27, 2025: Ronan Coffey, the National Director of Serve the City Ireland (pictured at far right), recounts to us how sometimes strangers can help a stuck person when family can’t. In this picture, he is with a group of volunteers who did a decluttering project in a hoarder house, similar to the one in this story.

If you want to hear a full-length episode in which Ronan tells us about STC Dublin’s decluttering work, listen to: Sparking Hope for a New Start.

Serving SHORT Stories 8: De-Junking Your Heart

March 13, 2025: Melinda Means of STC Berlin recounts a heartwarming story from the very beginning of her experience with Serve the City, at our Serving Stories Live event. This story shows that no matter how much we think we are giving others through serving, we always gain much more. (Melinda is pictured at right, with Berlin City Leader Christine Thumm.)

If you want to hear another episode featuring Melinda, listen to Humility: Mopping Mayors and Stumbling Stones.

Serving SHORT Stories 7: When Your Doorbell Rings

February 27, 2025: In this episode, we hear touching story from Rev. Annie Bolger, a chaplain a Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Brussels. Holy Trinity hosts the Community Kitchen, a close partner of Serve the City there. Annie tells us how the church has changed through opening its doors… and encourages us to do the same.

If you want to hear the previous episode also featuring Annie, listen to: Partnerships: Activists, Assemble!

Serving SHORT Stories 6: These Mugs are Green

February 13, 2025: Andre Mar and Austin Silva Mota, from Serve the City Lisbon, told us this story at our last Serving Stories Live event. It happened during Covid with a group of people in a homeless shelter who had joined a learning community called “Academy of Change.” One of the volunteers presented issues concerning the environment, and men responded by changing their own environment…

Below are some photos of another outcome of the workshops led by Andre—a brand called “Somos Pessoas” (“We are People”). The translation of the first picture is: We are people… experiencing social exclusion whose goal is to use their abilites to impact society and the local community.

Hear more from Austin Silva Mota about this group and the environment on: Friendly Neighbourhood Heroes.

Serving SHORT Stories 5: The Three Little Bigs

January 30, 2025: In this episode, we hear three mini-stories from Christine Thumm, leader of STC Berlin (pictured at right) that all took place in the the same elderly home. And we learn how three small acts of service had a really BIG impact!

If you want to hear another episode about serving in this same elderly home in Berlin, check out Generosity: What You Can See Out Wenceslas’ Window.

Serving SHORT Stories 4: A Shoebox Full of Love

December 12, 2024: This short story was told to us by Carlton Deal, Serve the City founder. At right, you can see some volunteers from the Brussels Christmas Shoebox project in his story delivering gifts to local charities.

Serving SHORT Stories 3: Sharing Kindness, One Stone at a Time

November 28, 2024: Above you can see Kindness Stones made by STC Gold Coast (Australia) Core Team member, Shan Berserik (front and reverse). In this short story, Shan told us how she makes these stones at the gathering sessions for Serve the City Community Days, and also gives the opportunity for other volunteers to craft them if they want, using paint pens. Check out her two little stories of how these stones had an impact on both recipients and those who made them!

If you want to hear another episode about Serve the City Gold Coast, listen to “Just Keep On Going!”

Serving SHORT Stories 2: Just Start With a Card

November 14, 2024: This story of hope, called “Just Start With a Card,” was shared by Ingeborg Dijkstra from STC Maastricht, at our Serving Stories Live event in 2023. Ingeborg is in the middle of the photo… serving (as always).

If you want to hear another episode about kindness in Maastricht, check out “Hope: Making Connections in Maastricht.“

Serving Short Story 1: All We Have Because We Did NOT Have the Gym

October 28, 2024: Our first mini-episode features a story about the very first Serve the City event in Brussels in 2005, told by STC founder and CEO, Carlton Deal. Here he is, at the 2008 Big Vounteer Week with his wife (and Serving Stories producer) Shannon Deal.

Season 3, Episode 1

“Every superhero has to go through a moment when they have to examine and choose. Will they choose a path that Will I choose a path that follows my own desires, or will I choose to live a life that serves and helps others around me?”

This moment of choice for a superhero is known as their ORIGIN STORY, that forms the motivation behind their actions.

For volunteers who choose to serve their city, their origin story is also an important part of the motivation that sends them out to serve.

On this episode of Serving Stories, we will find out the origin stories motivating four people to serve—all of whom now work with Serve the City’s International Team.

Listen to the episode HERE:

Want to think about how your own origin story might relate to the trope of the superhero? And especially how you can transform suffering to superpowers? Read this article on “Your Superhero Origin.”

This is the Serve the City International Leadership Team, on their Spring Retreat. The four people in this episode are: Carlton Deal, CEO (third from right, in back); Hazel Ebenezer, Global Programs Manager (near middle, in yellow); Rene Mally, Board Member (second from left, in back); and Sara Tchaparian, International Development Manager (second from left, in front). The International Leadership Team, composed of the Board, Executive Team and Operations Team, seeks to connect and resource the movement of STC globally.

Carlton Deal is the founder of Serve the City, having started it in Brussels, Belgium almost 20 years ago. His origin story started with leading teenagers on service projects in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, as a young man leading a youth organisation.

Carlton found motivation to serve not only in the positive results, but also in the friendships he formed while serving and the transformative joy that it brought to volunteers.

Some of Carlton’s motivation comes from the values for serving that you can see on his T-shirt in the photo: humility, compassion, respect, courage, love, and hope.

Carlton started Serve the City with a Big Volunteer Week in Brussels in July 2005. (You can see a video about it at the bottom of the post!) Above, you can see Carlton (and his wife Shannon) at the BVW in 2008; Carlton and friends from the first BVW at the 10th anniversary of STC in 2015; and Carlton with a Roma child in a squat a few years ago.

Hazel Ebenezer, from Goa, India, is the Global Programs Manager for STC International, and also the STC Asia Network Coordinator. Hazel discovered how deep her motivation for serving others was on a high school volunteering trip to Dharasalam in India, protesting to free Tibetan prisoners held in China.

“[The police] pulled up at the side of the road, got out of their cars, came towards us, and asked if they could borrow some of our signs and spend the rest of the time protesting with us and marching with us. And that was really a light bulb moment. And I knew from then on that it’s not about doing social work on the side, this is what I’m called to do. This is what I feel passionate about, and any hesitation or fear I had about what that could look like, just evaporated with that.”
Hazel Ebenezer

Hazel (centre front of group) loves the chance to motivate and connect others in volunteering—especially in Asia! Here she is training our STC Core Team in Manila, Philippines.

Rene Mally, from Germany, is a Board Member and also promoting Environmental projects and infrastructure in STC. He finds great joy and motivation in serving vulnerable children around the world.

Rene’s job has taken him all around the world: Sierra Leone, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Papua New Guinea… even Brussels! And wherever Rene goes, he finds a way to serve children. Twice, Rene has taken a sabbatical to volunteer in various places, such as Peru, Myanmar and Mozambique. On his last sabbatical in the Philippines, he met his wife! She shares his motivation to serve vulnerable kids, and they work together to run a trauma healing centre for children who have experienced sexual abuse.

“Volunteering as part of a relational giving, so to speak, is something that makes people flourish. It’s actually therapeutic in a way, and that’s what keeps me going.”
Rene Mally

This is Sara Tchaparian, with her father, Movses. Sara’s father is Armenian, and the son of survivors of the Armenian genocide in 1915. He grew up in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, and today lives in the UK.

Sara sees her father as her inspiration for serving, as he turned his trauma into generosity and care for those around him.

“Probably there was something in me that wanted to seek kind of justice for what had happened to my family because they were in need.”
Sara Tchaparian

Sara has lead many projects at STC Brussels, especially with refugees and migrants. At left, Sara leads volunteers on a project to clean up a shelter for undocumented migrants called Porte d’Ulysse; at right, Sara is with some of the staff of STC Brussels in front of their van.

You can listen to one of our previous episodes, featuring Sara, about the Porte d’Ulysse project in Brussels HERE.

And below is a video from our very first Big Volunteer Week in Brussels in 2005!

Season 2, Episode 15

Loneliness is one of the top mental health issues in cities—one touching people of all ages and backgrounds. Serve the City Maastricht, responding with hope to this crisis of loneliness, has introduced the Noah Friendship Platform in their city. The team matches individuals with potential friends based on common interests and personalities, and hosts events for people hoping for new connections. Whether you cherish a love for cats or an interest in sword fighting, there is hope for a friend to share it with!

In this episode, we visit a Noah Community Dinner and meet some of the people who have become “Noahs,” as well as the “friendship matchmaking” team that leads it. We learn how “Noah” has become a household word in Maastricht for a person who is dedicated to being a friend. And we find out how Serve the City Maastricht is giving hope to their city by living out their own unique motto:

We connect the city by helping each other!

Listen to this episode here:

The Serve the City Maastricht team! In this episode, we met Greet Rechter (far left), Ingeborg Dijkstra (kneeling, in glasses), and Matthew Lunders (behind Ingeborg). Though we were primarily discussing the Noah Platform, Matthew also told us about some of the volunteering opportunities that give hope to their city.

One of the reasons we wanted to come to Maastricht was because Ingeborg introduced us to the Noah Platform at our Serve the City Europe Forum. But also while there, Ingeborg told this inspiring story about hope for a woman struggling with mental health at our Serve the City Live Session. We wanted to share this story with you as well—you can listen below!

Shannon Deal (producer/writer of Serving Stories) interviewed the Noah Friendship Platform team both in the STC office (with Greet, at left) and at the monthly Noah Community Dinner for May 2024. At right, Shannon is talking to Greet Rechter (the Noah team coordinator) along with her team member, Mariana Serrano, and Mariana’s husband Juan. Greet and Mariana described for us how the Noah Platform works to match friends, and told us some very inspiring stories of how the program had brought hope in people’s lives.

Maastricht University just published a fantastic article featuring one of their international students who has become involved both with volunteering with STC Maastricht and with the Noah platform: you can read it HERE.

As the Noah Community Dinner opened for business, Mariana registered the guests (left), while the rest of the volunteer team welcomed each person who arrived (Ingeborg is in the centre, Greet talking to the guest at right).

The guests at the dinner were a real cross-section of the varied population of Maastricht: expats and locals, refugees and young professionals, university students and retirees. There were guests all around the world, as well as some who deal with disabilities (like the blind lady pictured at right with Greet)—but everyone came with the hope of making new friends.

(If you want to hear a Serving Stories episode specifically about hope of integration and recognition for people with disabilities, listen to Hope: Everyone’s Got Talent!)

As the dining room at The Social Hub filled up, people already started in engaging in lively conversations around their tables! Greet also let the guests know a little about Serve the City Maastricht and their upcoming events.

The volunteer team served a free dinner of vegetarian Indonesian food to the diners at their tables! (Who wouldn’t want to come for that?) Ingeborg dishes out Nasi Goreng in centre at left; Juan, Mariana’s husband, serves at the tables (right). Juan just celebrated 25 years with the Coast Guard by organising a Serve the City volunteer project with his colleagues!

One of our favorite stories from this episode was about how the team managed to match two Noahs who both loved medieval sword fighting. Our music maestro, Parker Deal, composed some Celtic metal swordfight music just for this story! (Imagine your favorite medieval videogame…) We liked it so much we thought we would share it by itself for you to enjoy… so here it is: “The Epic Swords of Maastricht.”