All:

I'm excited to announce that, effective immediately, NRCA will be implementing a community service component. This is a great opportunity for members to become more involved in volunteer work that is designed to help improve communities in the Arlington and metro DC regions, and I hope you (and your friends) will take advantage of it.

The way this will work is that, at the beginning of each month I will post all community service opportunities for the entire month. I will then post reminders as events approach. You do not need to notify me if you're planning to attend. Instead, feel free to simply follow the directions, show up at the event, and begin helping out.

Although you do not need to notify me ahead of time if you are planning to attend an event, I would like to be able to track participation numbers in some way. So if you attend an event, it would be great if you could just shoot me an email at my northrosslyn.org address and let me know which event you attended and for how many minutes/hours. I will then announce the number of community service hours we have logged as an organization at each of our quarterly meetings, and will also recognize outstanding individual participation. Please also feel free to invite friends and/or non-NRCA members to participate in service projects.

Service opportunities are being made available to us through an organization called "One Brick" that operates in the DC metro area. For more information about their organization, I would encourage you to check out their website at http://www.onebrick.org/, particularly the tabs for "calendar," "about us," and "photos," which will give you a better idea of the kinds of service opportunities that are available.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions. Otherwise, keep your eye out for service opportunity postings, and I hope you are all able take advantage of this opportunity at some point.

Thanks,

John S.