Community helping community

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. -

Rise up! It sounds like a call to action and it is -- a call to the community to step up and help families in their own community.

The organization Rise Up has been around for about 20 years in Johnson City, helping kids with after school programs and adult mentoring.

This week they've been getting a little bit of help themselves. A church youth group from Pittsburgh is hard at work getting General Shale stone work ready for a special gathering place at Johnson City's Rise Up.

They're all over the building and grounds doing what they can to help an organization that helps kids.

Andy Malcolm is one of its program directors. "We pick up kids at five different schools here in Johnson City. We take kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade. We do homework skills with them. We tutor them, we work on character education with them, we have them do community service," Malcomb said.

Just like the kids from Pittsburgh are doing, but they'll be on their way the end of the week. Rise Up will be here serving kids not only with the after school program but with a special mentoring program for a long time. "Our goal is to get those kids into the military or some kind of vocational training or into college after they graduate high school," Malcomb says.

And even after that. Malcolm tells the kids from Pittsburgh at lunch about just one of the kids they've been following for years. The story isn't falling on deaf ears.

"When they tell us the stories like they did today at lunch, just to hear how they helped kids and that this stuff we're doing will make them helping so much better and easier for them to help," Nicole Berner with the Discovery Christian Church youth group said.

"[It] just gives them some place they can like cope with things and they get to learn a little bit, have some fun and maybe it will help bring out the future in their lives," says Ben Meyers with the group.

It's an age-old idea that still holds true today. "It's a community of people that have come together to impact their own community and the kids and families in our community here," Malcomb added.

A little bit of help goes a long way with this group.

For more information about Rise Up, click here.

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