- BYU Service5
- BYU Woodwind Symphony Helping Hands
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- Service by BYU Woodwind
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| Temple Square is always beautiful in the springtime. Gardeners work to prepare the ground for General Conference. © 2012 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. | 1 / 2 |
The BYU Wind Symphony, 50 performers strong, is currently on a concert tour of eastern Australia. Along with providing magnificent concerts for their appreciative audiences across eastern Australia, the members of the Wind Symphony took some time out of their touring schedule to perform some valuable community service.
On Saturday, 7th May the student-musicians from the Wind Symphony visited the Blue Mountains, including the area of the Three Sisters at Echo Point Katoomba, Australia. Thereafter the students, together with their tour manager, Karson Denney, and other BYU staff personnel volunteered to roll up their sleeves and dig into cleaning up the gardens, landscape and facilities at Greystanes Disability Services (“Greystanes”) property in nearby Leura, NSW.
The students arrived in their casual work clothes, then donned yellow “Helping Hands” vests. At that point, the group was met by Janessa Balfour, Community Engagement Coordinator of Greystanes, and Jesse Campton from Adam’s Eden Gardening, a contractor for Greystanes. Mr. Campton quickly organised the students and their accompanying adult personnel into ten smaller groups, and gave each group an assigned task to complete in the next two hours. Those tasks varied from window cleaning to planting tulip bulbs in the garden bed, digging and clearing out overgrown weeds, plants, and moss from planting beds and footpaths, washing facility vans and numerous other outdoor tasks.
The university-aged student-musicians proved equally adept providing “service with a smile” through their gardening, weeding, and beautifying the Greystanes grounds as they are at their concert music. Within two hours, the grounds and accessible gardens of the Greystanes facility looked immaculate. After watching the hard-working students work around the Greystone facility for the afternoon, Janessa Balfour commented, “It is wonderful to have so many energetic people working in the garden, helping make it a beautiful space for the people Greystanes supports to engage in their daily activities. We cannot thank them enough for their hard work and service.”
The BYU Wind Symphony concert tour continues with performances in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia through 21 May 2018.
Pictures courtesy of Tara Goisisi and Luis Fernando Puente