‘A day on:’ Martin Luther King Jr. honored at BYU’s annual community outreach day
-
- Volunteers disassemble glasses at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Outreach Day Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Provo.
-
- BYU’s Rhythm N’ Soul Collective performs at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Outreach Day Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Provo.
-
- Elder Peter M. Johnson speaks at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Outreach Day Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Provo.
-
- Volunteers participate in a service project at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Outreach Day Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Provo.
For the 20th straight year, the Y-Serve program at Brigham Young University honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday with MLK Community Outreach Day.
In collaboration with the Sorensen Center, Y-Serve partnered with more than a dozen community organizations Monday and hundreds of volunteers to complete service projects.
“Most of our programming is for BYU students only, but this one, by design, and specifically by inspiration from Dr. King’s legacy, is to build community,” Y-Serve director Chris Crippen said. “And so everybody’s here doing good things for the community in his name today. Dr. King laid a great foundation of faith, of audacity, of inspiration, and all of that is built on and repeated here in the efforts that our volunteers contribute.”
The event began in the Wilkinson Center with a message from Jason Nouanounou, a member of the Black Student Union at BYU, and a keynote speech from Elder Peter M. Johnson, a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Volunteers then broke off into different groups to participate in service activities around campus.
One of the partnerships was with Stitching Hearts Worldwide, a nonprofit based in Pleasant Grove that offers service opportunities to create humanitarian projects. Volunteers tied quilts and wove plastic sleeping mats.
“Students around campus will bring us their plastic grocery bags that they collect, and we use that,” Y-Serve’s Corinne Estes said. “We cut them in a specific way, and we weave them into these waterproof mats that you can carry around with you. They’re super lightweight, but they also keep you up to 40 degrees warmer.”
Stitching Hearts founder Krysti Wright said the sleeping mats are distributed to local homeless people through the food bank and are also sent to locations worldwide.
“We also give these items that are being made, and these service events are then sent all over the world — Jordan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Somalia, Guatemala, even here at home,” Wright said.
Y-Serve lead program director Jacob Willes said other projects involved giving blood, making flowers out of tissue paper to take to hospice patients and popping prescription lenses out of glasses to ship to people in need of lenses around the world.
Willes said King stood for good, and that the day provided a chance to spread that good and help society remember the principles he taught.
“So I think that anything we can do to honor and replicate him, especially as followers of Jesus Christ, I think is good,” Willes said. “And so doing a service event to honor him, I think, is a great way to do that.”
