Day of Action volunteers perform service projects around the Mid-Ohio Valley

The following article first appeared in The Parkersburg News & Sentinel on June 21st, 2025

Having people from different businesses and groups coming together to help better the community is the continuing theme of the ninth annual Day of Action.

Around 200 volunteers went out to 20 sites around the Mid-Ohio Valley on Friday to help with various service projects for United Way-funded agencies, ranging from doing construction work for Habitat For Humanity to clearing weeds and laying mulch to cleaning and clearing out trash and more.

The Day of Action is a collaboration of the United Way Alliance of the Mid-Ohio Valley and sponsor WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center. Other groups who volunteered to help Friday included Celanese, Highmark, WesBanco, Community Bank, the McDonough Foundation, Chemours, CAS Cable, Detrin and West Virginia University at Parkersburg.

“This is the single largest day of volunteer service in the Mid-Ohio Valley each year,” said United Way Executive Director Stacy DeCicco. “Things have gone fantastic.

“We could not have been gifted with better weather. It has been a really good day, probably one of our more exciting days. We have seen people really going the extra mile and really delivering big on these projects.”

A group of six women from Highmark West Virginia helped with a Habitat For Humanity “Women Build” on Plum Street. The house being built is for a woman and her two kids.

“We are doing a little bit of everything,” said Linda Wigal of Highmark. “We are helping to lay floor, putting the covers on the electrical outlets and doing some cleanup work,” she said. “It is very important to give back to the community and if you can help somebody, make a difference and have a positive impact on people in need who live in this valley.”

Camden Clark had six teams out throughout the area with a total of around 50 volunteers. They had groups at the YMCA of Parkersburg, the Habitat For Humanity Restore in Vienna, the Boys & Girls Club of Washington County in Marietta, the new Wood County Senior Center administrative offices in Parkersburg, Artsbridge and downtown Parkersburg for a cleanup project.

Camden Clark President and CEO Sean Smith was with a group of 10 people at the new administrative offices for Wood County Senior Citizens on Dudley Avenue doing some landscaping work, pulling weeds, trimming bushes, laying mulch and planting flowers.

“We are revitalizing it and cleaning up the outside,” Smith said. “We are trying to make it look alive again.”

DeCicco said over 25% of workers who came out Friday were from Camden Clark. The medical center also hosted a kickoff breakfast for the volunteers on the center’s North Tower patio Friday morning.

It was important for officials at Camden Clark to bring people out and help with these projects to show their dedication to the area, he said.

“It shows our commitment to giving back to the community,” Smith said. “We are appreciative to everyone for stepping up for a day and helping out.

“We are an organization of service. We take care of patients when they come to us so it is important for us to be out in the community as well, helping out anyway we can.”

At the Mid-Ohio Valley Fellowship Home in Parkersburg, a crew of six people from Celanese and clients from the home were working on cleaning out the home’s attic space in an “attic sweep” which cleared out old documents, broken items and other things that have been accumulating for years.

“It is a big deal and it is something that has been on our agenda to do for the last three years,” said Fellowship Home Director Brandy Blatt.

With the extra help, they were able to help get that space cleaned out which opens things up so they can do another planned project sometime in the future which includes a room where clients will be able to do some of their hobbies, play music and more.

“It is just another safe space that we can utilize,” Blatt said. “It is pretty big up there.”

Having people able to come in and be able to donate their time to a small non-profit is important because they don’t have the funds to be able to hire someone to come in and help, she said.

“Having a group of volunteers is like Christmas,” she said. “This is hard labor. This is going up and down two flights of stairs. It is moving furniture as well as boxes and boxes of old files.

“They came in with smiles and ready to help with a servant’s heart. It has been phenomenal.”

In addition to the help, the volunteers are able to see what is done at the Fellowship Home and see the kind of services that are available to people dealing with addiction, Blatt said, adding connections are made among different people in the community.

“It is about making relationships with these people as they may have had people in their lives dealing with addiction and now they have made a new connection,” she said. “These community collaborations are much bigger than just doing a project or a clean-up. It provides us with another resource and it provides one for them too.”

DeCicco shared the story of a man from South Carolina who had been working at Camden Clark for nine months as a traveling nurse. Saturday is his last day in the area. He came down to ride the sternwheeler over to Blennerhassett Island on Friday before he left, but the boat wasn’t running because of river conditions and he noticed the groups working at the Greater Parkersburg Convention and Visitors Bureau area near Point Park. He ended up joining them and helping out.

“We have never had an out-of-towner before, but we had an out-of-towner join our team,” DeCicco said. “I think that is because there is a really good energy going on (Friday).

“We have some teams that have two companies working together and that always creates a nice dynamic and synergy. They are meeting other people in the community they didn’t know.”

Volunteers got to meet clients with Recovery Point who were also out helping on some of the projects. After lunch some of the people talked to these clients about what the face of recovery looks like, what the stigmas are and what barriers they face.

“It is all about people in our community getting to know each other as well as the challenges that non-profits face,” DeCicco said. “It is exciting to see the camaraderie, the energy and then the creative thought that goes into elevating the project and delivering more.’