User:Traegs/Salkehatchie Summer Service

Salkehatchie Summer Service is a selection of volunteer mission camps in South Carolina designed to alleviate the extreme poverty found in much of the rural southeast. Homeowners who are unable to alter the deteriorating state of their homes are offered the services of high school and college aged youth and skilled and unskilled adults to renovate the buildings for them. Salkehatchie is a United Methodist ministry named for the Salkehatchie River in the lowcountry of South Carolina near where the first camps came together in 1976, '77, and '78 with a few dozen volunteers each year under the direction of Reverend John Culp. Four homes were renovated in 1978. By 2012, there were over 45 camps in South Carolina, three in North Carolina and one in Georgia with an estimated total of 3,533 volunteers. As of 2003 an estimated 2,045 homes had been renovated, a number projected to be upward of 4,800 total homes renovated by 2012.