Saturday, Oct. 9, is a great day to be part of the Georgetown community. People from around the District as well as Maryland and Virginia will flood Wisconsin Avenue to share in Taste of Georgetown. The event highlights local businesses and raises money for the homeless who receive services at the Georgetown Ministry Center. Organized by the Georgetown Business Improvement District, Grace Church and the Ministry Center, the event relies on teams of volunteers and the support of the community to be a success. 

Georgetown Patch as well as editors from Patch sites in Clarendon, Ballston and Gaithersburg will join the team of volunteers and do our part to help make Taste of Georgetown a success. The four of us are volunteering as part of Patch's Give5 program, in which employees give back to the communities they provide news for.

Volunteering was actually the first spark in the creation of Patch. In 2007, Tim Armstrong was trying to find an opportunity for his family to volunteer locally in his community of Greenwich, CT. He found that there was not a fast, easy, and rich online source to find organizations that needed volunteers in the community. For a guy who was a Google executive at the time, that was a pretty frustrating realization.

Armstrong, who is now the CEO of AOL, decided to form Patch. By early 2009, the company had sites serving three towns in New Jersey. Since then, Patch has grown to 238 communities (and counting) including Georgetown, the only Patch site in Washington, D.C.

In August, the editor for Germantown Patch and I volunteered at the Georgetown Ministry Center. We met the dedicated staff and the grateful men and women who do their laundry, use the Internet and take a shower if they are some of the first to arrive in the morning. I am looking forward to volunteering at Taste of Georgetown to help the Ministry Center and to feel even more a part of the great community we have in Georgetown.

Stop by the tote bag table and say hi on Saturday!