“How wonderful it is that no one need wait a single moment to improve the world.”
— Anne Frank
Over the years the Woodworth family has been engaged in numerous community service projects and global humanitarian programs. Below are a few highlights from the past.
Local Community Service
Hosting handicapped youth in our home and helping to operate the Utah Special Olympics.
Neighborhood cleaning up yards and homes of the elderly.
Helping our neighbors organize and load/unload as they relocate. My boys and I once calculated that we’d packed and moved over a hundred families through the years.
Making sandwiches and preparing lunch boxes for the Food and Shelter Coalition.
Volunteering at various Church welfare farms to pick fruit (apples, peaches, cherries, pears) to be crated for the needy.
Serving at the LDS Cannery to bottle the fruit for welfare contributions to poor families.
Personal fast offering donations to help poor LDS members.
Our annual Sub-for-Santa family support.
Ongoing local service projects–building trails in the mountains, painting trash cans in Hawaii, organizing fund-raisers for local groups like the Children’s Justice Center.
Jointly buying groceries for international student families, packing them carefully and setting them on the porch, ringing the doorbell and running–a real fun Woodworth tradition.
Warner has served for 5 years on the Utah Valley Ministerial Association (UVMA) representing the LDS Church in the area as we collaborated in National Prayer Day, firesides, service projects, social support, needs of the homeless, etc.
Global Humanitarian Projects
Our family typically attends several charity banquets/auction events each year to donate products and monies in helping Utah-based NGOs continue or expand their international efforts.
Over ten years, five of us (Kaye, Erik, Micah, Kristi, and Warner) have raised money and paid our own way to Mali, West Africa to spend two weeks a year doing volunteer village development projects through the Ouelessebougou-Utah Alliance–schools, health care, microcredit, etc.
Kaye and Warner led a group of U.S. donors to a ten-day humanitarian service project in Guatemala–building homes, doing square foot gardens, teaching English, etc.
Erik and Warner spent a week doing volunteer work with victims of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, setting up village banks, volunteering at orphanages, doing computer training, etc.
Kaye and Warner led an expedition of some 30 Utahns to Peru to carry out the agenda of numerous village development efforts in the Sacred Valley of the Inca, Peru–building a school, setting up a computer lab, and establishing a solar heating system, village library, Lorena stoves, and building greenhouses for family self-reliance.
Micah and Warner enjoyed an expedition to Guatemala where we labored with one of our NGOs in various villages and evaluated their work.
Kaye and Warner spent 2 weeks in Kenya with Yehu Microfinance in Mombasa and Jamii Bora in Nairobi learning best practices and sharing new capital for microlending.
Kaye and Warner helped organize a huge relief and rebuilding effort in Thailand after the devastating Asian tsunami
Doug, Micah, and Warner spent two weeks working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake evaluating our team’s work and planning for the future.
Warner and his brother Mark worked together in Fiji learning and reviewing the work of our student-based NGO seeking to empower the poor of the island nation.