How to Host a Service Project Party + Free Printables!

The holiday season is the perfect time to Host a Service Project Party. Whether you plan to pack lunches, assemble holiday food baskets, toiletry kits or “Blessing Bags”, my tips and free printables make it easy to support community members in need while celebrating the spirit of giving.

The holiday season is here and many of us will be gathering with family and friends to celebrate. This year, why not channel your good cheer into doing something positive for your community? Host a Service Project Party– its a great way to gather friends and family for a meaningful celebration without a lot of extra fuss (seriously, I promise). With my free printables and easy & affordable set up tips, you can create an organized and festive “party” atmosphere that is still focused squarely on giving back.

Here’s how…

Choose Your Project

The first thing you need to do to Host a Service Project Party is choose your project. This concept works especially well for projects that require assembly-line style participation. For our party, we chose to assemble sack lunches for distribution at our church’s annual winter coat drive event, where attendees receive a warm winter coat and leave with a sack lunch.

To choose your own project, start by contacting local churches, shelters, food pantries or support organizations in your community. Beyond sack lunches, many groups are in need of Holiday Dinner Baskets, Family Wish List Donations or Toiletry Bags for the homeless. In the event you are unable to find a local organization in need, your Service Project Party attendees could also assemble “Blessing Bags” to keep in your cars and distribute when you come across someone see a need.

Purchase & Organize Supplies

Once you’ve determined your project, you’ll need to purchase supplies. You might ask each attendee to bring a portion of the supplies with them to the party or you can purchase everything in advance and split the cost. Either way, you’ll want to have a game plan for organizing everything in advance. Don’t forget key packaging items like bags, glue sticks or staplers!

Tablescape & Food

To create a festive color scheme for the day, I drew inspiration from the brown paper bags and blue encouragement cards we would be securing to the sack lunches.

Speaking of lunches, I kept the food for our party guests fairly simple. Since most of our attendees were children, we served sandwiches (the same ones we were packing in our service project bags), fresh fruit and veggies and boxed macaroni and cheese. For dessert, I told our guests they’d all earned a few “brownie points” by helping with our service project (i.e. we served brownies).

When it came time to organize our assembly line/party space, I covered the table in brown Kraft paper from the Dollar store and arranged all of our supplies using bowls, baskets and table linens in similar colors. Arranging everything in large bowls and baskets corralled all of our supplies and created an organized table for assembly.

Free Printables: Encouragement Cards, Favor Tags and Garland

To give our sack lunches a polished look and a personal touch, we added custom-made encouragement cards to the front of each bag. The tags read, “Packed Especially for You Because You Matter.” These words of encouragement would also be a wonderful addition to Food Baskets, Toiletry Kits or Blessing Bags.

You can download a free printable sheet of these Encouragement Cards by clicking here.

This may be a service oriented event, but its still a party! At the end of the day, each of our guests left with a small tin of hand cream topped with a tag declaring “Thank you for lending a helping hand!” At less than a dollar per tin, this was an affordable and thoughtful way to thank our guests — and one that should be especially useful as we head into the dry winter season.

You can download a free printable sheet of Helping Hand Favor Tags by clicking here.

(PSST: I cut out a second sheet of tags and taped them to twine to create the decorative garland).

Party Time!

When our guests arrived, we immediately organized an assembly line. A few of the grownups and older children made and wrapped sandwiches, while others worked to pack the lunch bags and add tags.

Having everything organized in advance ensured a smooth and fun operation where even our youngest guests were able to help. Our group packed 30 lunches in under an hour. We spent time explaining the need for these lunches to our young guests and they felt great about being helping.

During the hectic holiday season, looking for service opportunities can sometimes feel like “just one more thing”. But honestly, not only was this Service Project Party the most rewarding party I’ve ever hosted, it was also one of the easiest to plan an execute.

By keeping things simple and using my ideas and free printables, I hope you too can add a service element to your holiday celebrations. Happy Thanksgiving!