ROSES to the employees from KB Home who volunteered their time and energy to help tidy up a Hillsborough neighborhood. About 15 employees from KB Home, which is building the new Kenion Grove development, gathered Monday to pick up litter in Fairview, a nearby neighborhood.

“This came about at a request from citizens for help cleaning up,” Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens said. “KB Home had wanted to do something for the community. It was nice to put these people together.”


ROSES to the local recipients of the North Carolina Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service’s 2007 Awards for Outstanding Volunteer Service.

The award, now in its 29th year, goes to people “who have shown concern and compassion for their neighbors by making a significant contribution to their community through volunteer service.”

The commission honored five people from Orange County: Ana Prothro, Carol Gunn, JoAnn Pitz, John Mathivet and Berneta Lemon.

Prothro and Pitz do volunteer service with Duke Hospice. Gunn volunteers with the Orange County Animal Services. Mathivet does volunteer work for Orange County Habitat for Humanity, and Lemon serves with the Orange County Disability Awareness Council.

Nonprofit organizations do an enormous amount of good work in the community, and in many of them volunteers do a lot of the heavy lifting. The Orange County award winners deserve the praise the commission granted, but in a sense they represent all of this community’s many volunteers who give freely of their time, energy and expertise.


ROSES to teacher Allison Eaton and the members of Cedar Ridge High School Biology Club, who get up extra early to spend some time working with younger students.

The members of the Biology Club have been spending some time at Hillsborough Elementary School, helping first-graders learn about birds. Called “biology buddies,” they go to the classrooms and team up with the younger students to do hands-on science projects, which require more hands than one first-grade teacher and an assistant can usually provide.

Teens are notoriously fond of their sleep, and the biology buddy project requires the high school kids to get up even earlier than usual; they have to be at Hillsborough Elementary 45 minutes before their own classes start. But when Eaton proposed the project and asked for volunteers, she was surprised and delighted to find about 20 takers.

Young kids tend to love hanging out with older ones, so it’s no surprise that the elementary school students eat it up. But clearly the older kids are getting a lot out of the project, too; they’re talking about taking it to another school next semester.