A group of young volunteers recently gave up a Saturday morning to give service at South Brisbane Cemetery.
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Youth volunteers cleaning the graves and grounds, and photographing gravestones at South Brisbane Cemetery2021 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.Arriving with a trailer load of equipment, 180 young people, aged 14-17, split into several groups to trim and cut branches, clean gravestones, clear paths, tidy gravesites, and photograph headstones for the BillionGraves cemetery data resource.
The project was a special event for the Centenary Stake Youth Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A stake is a group of congregations.
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Young volunteer cleans a headstone during service project at South Brisbane Cemetery2021 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.The young people registered for this project on the JustServe website which is a service platform that matches volunteers with projects from local community organisations needing service, in this case, Friends of South Brisbane Cemetery.
Mele Manu, youth volunteer, said, "We were the biggest group they'd ever had, and they said the amount of work we did in just one and a half hours was equivalent to what they'd get done in a year!"
She added, "It was so fun and felt awesome knowing that we were a part of this great work on both sides of the veil."
Tracey Olivieri, founder and president of the Friends of South Brisbane Cemetery, said, “We are so overwhelmed by the work and love from our special helpers today that saying thank you does not seem enough.”
He continued, “Many graves in the South Brisbane Cemetery no longer have families to care for them; some family lines have sadly died off. This is one reason why we clean them. All ancestors past should be remembered.”