From K9 facilities and school campuses to Historic Folsom, senior assistance and military care packages, volunteers have dozens of ways to serve Sept. 19
FOLSOM — The projects are taking shape, the planning is well underway, and now it is time for Folsom residents to choose where they want to lend a hand. Volunteer registration has officially opened for the 13th annual Folsom Community Service Day, set for Saturday, Sept. 19, and this year’s growing roster offers dozens of ways for residents to participate.
From building and beautification projects to helping seniors, improving school campuses, restoring pieces of Historic Folsom, reducing fire fuels, collecting food and packing care packages for military personnel, the 2026 lineup illustrates just how broad the annual day of service has become.
Hundreds of residents, families, businesses, service organizations, students, churches and community groups are expected to spread out across Folsom for a morning dedicated to helping others and improving the community they call home.
The opening of volunteer registration marks the next major step toward an event that has grown into one of Folsom’s largest annual community traditions. Each year, volunteers tackle projects across the city in a matter of hours, putting thousands of combined hours of labor into improvements that can remain visible long after Community Service Day is over.
This year, volunteers looking for a hands-on construction or improvement project have plenty to choose from and can do so on the official City of Folsom Volunteer Sign Up Webpage here.
Among the projects on the 2026 roster is work benefiting the Folsom Police Department’s K9 Unit, where volunteers will work on a shed project. At BT Collins Disc Golf Course, another team will work on tee pads and construction of a shade structure.
Folsom Bike Park is also on this year’s project list, while projects in the growing Folsom Ranch area include trail stenciling, cleaning stormwater drainage areas and a White Rock cleanup.
At McFarland Park, volunteers will spread mulch, while Lew Howard Park and the Rotary Clubhouse are slated for cleanup and mulch refreshing. Egloff Family Park will receive a cleanup as well.
Another distinctive project on the roster involves painting fire hydrants with a patriotic theme, giving volunteers an opportunity to combine community beautification with a little creativity.
The Bridge Community Church will be the site of several projects during the day. Volunteers are being sought for parking lot and stair line striping, tree trimming, curb replacement and renovation work involving the church’s Jesus stained-glass feature.
Mt. Olive Lutheran Church, a presenting sponsor of Community Service Day, has a campus beautification project planned as part of the day.
Folsom’s schools will once again receive considerable volunteer attention.
Projects through the Folsom Cordova Unified School District are scheduled at Sutter Middle School, Gold Ridge Elementary School, Russell Ranch Elementary School, Blanche Sprentz Elementary School, Carl H. Sundahl Elementary School and Empire Oaks Elementary School. Volunteers at those campuses will tackle beautification projects intended to spruce up spaces used by local students and school communities throughout the year.
Other projects are focused less on places and more directly on people.
Neighbors Helping Seniors returns to the Community Service Day lineup, connecting volunteers with projects designed to assist older residents. Over the history of Community Service Day, volunteers have completed more than 660 exterior home repair and maintenance projects for local seniors, providing assistance with jobs that can become difficult or costly for residents to complete on their own.
The Folsom Senior Center is also on this year’s roster with a picnic table project, while Mercy Creekview Manor Senior Housing has a landscaping project planned.
Volunteers with sewing skills — or those interested in putting those skills toward a special cause — can participate in the Bears by Your Side sewing project.
Girls Love Mail is another project on the 2026 roster, providing a different type of volunteer opportunity from the outdoor construction, cleanup and landscaping work taking place around the city.
Powerhouse Ministries’ Residential Recovery Center is also among this year’s participating locations, as is Folsom’s Hope, where planned work includes a swing set, playground reorganization, anchoring and painting of a shade structure.
Historic Folsom will see several teams at work during Community Service Day.
Volunteers at Historic Folsom Plaza will tackle weeding and mulch work, while another Historic Folsom project will focus on weeding and decomposed granite. Other volunteers will refinish benches used for the seasonal ice rink and restring and repair the snowman display that becomes part of the district’s holiday scenery.
At the Folsom History Museum, volunteers will work on refurbishing the break room.
Environmental work also represents a significant portion of the 2026 lineup.
Along Folsom Boulevard, volunteers will remove litter, while another team will perform fire fuel reduction work along Humbug Creek. With wildfire prevention and vegetation management continuing to be important throughout the region, the Humbug Creek project gives volunteers an opportunity to put their morning of service toward reducing combustible vegetation.
A massive food collection effort
One of Community Service Day’s largest continuing undertakings will return this year as volunteers collect food throughout Folsom for Twin Lakes Food Bank.
The food drive has become a defining part of Community Service Day. Over the event’s first 12 years, volunteers have collected more than 691,000 pounds of food for the local nonprofit, helping stock its shelves and provide groceries to local individuals and families facing food insecurity.
Pulling off an effort of that size takes volunteers working at numerous locations and in numerous roles.
The 2026 roster includes neighborhood collection teams, drivers and helpers assigned to multiple collection sites. Separate teams include participants from the Muslim Community of Folsom and Oak Hills, along with other neighborhood collection locations across the city.
Additional volunteers will work with Folsom Youth and Hands4Hope, while drivers will retrieve missed donation bags and others will receive and sort the food arriving from throughout the community.
Twin Lakes Food Bank itself is also on the Community Service Day project roster with a painting project.
The many individual assignments demonstrate the logistics behind an operation that, on Community Service Day morning, brings food donations from neighborhoods throughout Folsom to a central point where they can be sorted and prepared for distribution.
Some of the work completed Sept. 19 will ultimately travel far beyond the city limits.
The Military Care Package Packing Event returns as part of this year’s lineup, continuing another longtime Community Service Day tradition. Volunteers will work together to assemble packages for military personnel, extending the reach of the communitywide event to service members away from home.
A donation drive will also require volunteers in several roles, including booth leads, drivers and project support.
A blood drive is another component of the day, with volunteers needed to help support that effort.
Together, the projects demonstrate the range of ways someone can participate. Community Service Day is not limited to volunteers who can lift lumber, spread mulch or spend a morning performing strenuous outdoor work. There are opportunities involving organization, collection, sorting, sewing, packing, driving and other forms of assistance.
Community Service Day was created around a straightforward idea: bring Folsom together for one day and put the community’s collective energy toward projects that can make a tangible difference.
Over the past 12 years, that idea has translated into more than 24,900 volunteers completing more than 1,130 projects throughout the city.
Beyond the more than 691,000 pounds of food collected for Twin Lakes Food Bank and hundreds of projects assisting senior residents, volunteers have assembled thousands of care packages for active-duty military personnel and completed projects benefiting schools, parks, nonprofit organizations and public spaces throughout Folsom.
The City of Folsom has described the annual effort as a modern-day “community barn-raising,” with residents working side by side with businesses, nonprofit organizations, civic groups, schools and city leaders to accomplish projects that might otherwise take considerably longer to complete.
That spirit of working together remains at the heart of the event.
Community Service Day is designed to offer opportunities for volunteers of varying ages, interests and abilities. Families can volunteer together, while businesses, churches, clubs, sports teams, neighborhood groups and other organizations can turn the morning into a group service project.
For newcomers, the event can also provide a different look at their community. Volunteers may spend the morning working at a school their children do not attend, improving a park across town, helping a senior they have never met or working alongside residents whose paths they might otherwise never cross.
For returning volunteers, Sept. 19 continues a tradition that has become part of Folsom’s civic calendar.
This year’s Community Service Day follows months of planning by the Community Service Day Steering Committee and its community partners.
During a recent meeting, Folsom Mayor Justin Raithel and members of the steering committee announced an extension of the deadline for residents and organizations to submit project ideas. The additional time was intended to bring more potential projects forward and broaden the number of ways volunteers could make an impact during this year’s event.
Now that the project roster has taken shape, the focus turns to matching those projects with the people needed to get them done.
Volunteer registration allows participants to review available opportunities and select projects that fit their interests. Some projects have specific participation requirements or are being coordinated for particular groups, while many others are open for general volunteer registration. Availability will vary by project as volunteer slots are filled.
Residents interested in a particular project are encouraged to register early rather than waiting until Community Service Day approaches.
When Saturday, Sept. 19 arrives, those individual registrations will turn into teams scattered across Folsom — painting, planting, building, cleaning, collecting, repairing, packing, sorting and helping neighbors.
The numbers accumulated over the event’s first 12 years tell part of the story: nearly 25,000 volunteers, more than 1,100 completed projects and hundreds of thousands of pounds of donated food.
The other part is found in the individual projects — a refreshed school campus, a safer trail, a cleaner park, a repaired senior’s home, a stocked food bank, a care package headed to a service member or a piece of Historic Folsom prepared for another season.
On Sept. 19, Folsom will add another morning — and dozens more projects — to that record.
The 13th annual Folsom Community Service Day takes place Saturday, Sept. 19. Volunteer registration is now open through the City of Folsom’s Community Service Day registration system, where residents can view available projects, requirements and remaining volunteer opportunities.
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