Editor’s Note: This story is part of our series “Helping Hands”, which aims to spotlight Johnson Countians doing good in the background of their community. If you have an idea for someone to spotlight in a future “Helping Hands” story, email us at stories@johnsoncountypost.com.
Cathy Hammack’s hands are in the dirt a lot lately.
As a before-and-after-school program director for the past decade with Johnson County Parks and Recreation, Hammack has to wear many hats. For one part of her role at Clear Creek Elementary the past three years or so, she leads the school’s community garden.
When she seeded the garden for a summer camp activity, she had hoped it would help both the students there and the community at large.
Since then, she said, it’s become more than just vegetables that have grown there. In a sense, she’s watched students grow there too as they take the garden on as their own to maintain.
The garden serves as one of several ways Hammack has tried to give back to the community and to teach her students to do the same.
Students maintain the garden and grow its veggies
In the garden, students from kindergarten to fifth grade grow and harvest vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and zucchini. While Hammack oversees it as the program director, she said the students have taken on primary ownership of caring for it.
Though the garden started out as primarily a summer camp activity for the kids, Hammack said it’s become a year-round activity. When they aren’t tending to vegetables, students maintain the garden’s grounds through several tasks; watering, weeding, you name it.
In part, the produce in the garden serves the school. But it also serves the wider community, with excess produce going to nearby families.
“We try to eat what we grow here, and then we also set up a table so that the parents can come take some home,” Hammack said. “And then I send out an email or post on Facebook just to let the neighborhood know that we have veggies growing. Last year, the kids (also) made signs and flags so that everybody could see where the table was.”
Hammack aims to teach students how to give back
Clear Creek Elementary previously had a garden on its grounds, where the school would grow gourds and paint them for fall fundraisers. When things slowed down in the garden for a couple of years, Hammack said she wanted to bring it back as a way to help the kids take on a passion project and learn some new skills.
For the students, she said, it’s been a labor of love.
“It’s a real big deal — they love planting it, and they love taking care of it,” she said. “It’s really inspiring.”
Outside of organizing the garden, Hammack tries to find other ways to help out the community through her work with the school. Sometimes that looks like organizing donation drives for Children’s Mercy Hospital, food pantries and other local fundraising efforts like Bailee’s Closet, which collects donated clothes for children and families.
Other times, she said it looks like showing up to students’ sporting events, so they know someone is in the audience who supports them.
“When you’re working with kids, it’s like you’re raising the next generation,” she said. “I try to teach them that these little things matter, that they’re important. It takes a village to raise kids, and I’m very blessed to be a part of this village and this community.”
Hammack’s volunteer efforts go beyond Johnson County
Hammack’s home turf isn’t the only place she’s lent a hand. When disaster strikes and displaces animals across the country, she’s there to help too.
For roughly two decades, Hammack has volunteered with an organization called Animal Search And Rescue, which aims to locate and rescue animals during natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.
As a former animal control officer, Hammack said she was drawn to the organization’s rescue mission. When the group isn’t helping with rescues, they also spend time teaching and training firefighters in animal handling across the country.
Since becoming a search and rescue volunteer, the number of hurricane-related animal rescues that Hammack has participated in has hit the double digits.
The range of animals that the group has rescued varies widely — from dogs and cats to less common pets like turtles. Oftentimes, those pets are all people have left after a hurricane.
“(Those people) have lost everything,” she said. “To be able to go and hand them their pet — their family member — knowing that they’ve lost everything else, it’s a really great feeling.”
After all, Hammack said, it’s not difficult to imagine being put in their shoes. Whether it’s through seeing how a hurricane can destroy a home or by watching the shelves quickly empty at a local food pantry, she said all of her community service work has given her one big takeaway — hard times can happen to anyone.
“It kind of teaches you that you could be there at any moment,” she said. “You might have everything you need, but not everybody has that, and it’s important to help out. Paying it forward is a really big thing for me.”
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