Love Oakdale
Our simple mission: to inspire our community to love each other. How do we do this? Everything we do falls within these five mandates:
Love Your City: Our City-Wide Volunteer Day is held on the last Saturday of each April. This year, over 800 volunteers served on over 60 projects throughout Oakdale serving the people and places of Oakdale. In addition to our annual event, supporting city events is a big focus for Love Oakdale year-round. You can find us running carnival games on Halloween at the city celebration, participating in public meetings, and assisting residents code enforcement brings to our attention. We love our city; it's right in our name!
Love Your Neighbors: Love Oakdale receives referrals from city staff, local non-profits, Love Stanislaus County, and even Facebook. We are ready to serve our neighbors in need anytime. Coordinating teams of volunteers for yard clean-ups, organizing furniture donations for county referrals, assisting with rent and utilities, and even purchasing dog food for our senior citizens' pets are some of the ways we collaborate with community members to meet needs as they arise. We've never had a need emerge that the people of Oakdale didn't rally to meet!
Love Your Schools: Working closely with our district loving our schools is a huge focus of our City-Wide Volunteer Day. This past April, more than 300 volunteers painted, weeded, cleaned, and moved bark to help refresh our schools. New partnerships are in the works with Love Stanislaus County, and we are excited to increase our role in supporting our schools year-round.
Love Your Non-Profits: Oakdale is blessed to have several non-profit organizations serving our community, and we work to support them in any way we can. In addition to serving them during our City-Wide Volunteer Day, we’ve answered calls for referrals, provided gifts, clothing, and food for programs, set up carnival games at events, and organized a fundraiser for a struggling organization. We also love giving them a platform to share their mission at the Oakdale Morning Market. Serving those who serve others is a joy!
Love Your Small Businesses: Believing a community can’t thrive without a vibrant small business community. Love Oakdale is passionate about supporting our small businesses. We purchase raffle prizes for our events, host marketing workshops and purchase signage, organize a Christmas window decorating contest, offered cash giveaways during 3rd Avenue construction, and offered grants towards Morning Market sponsorships to help local businesses increase their exposure.. One of our newest projects, Oakdale Young Entrepreneurs (OYE!), is working hard to equip Oakdale’s future business owners.
Oakdale Morning Market: Beyond these efforts, we wanted to create a venue for building community and a place where we could practice almost all of our mandates on a regular basis. Launched in May of 2023, the Oakdale Morning Market is held each Saturday morning from May through September. It features a rotating collection of exceptional vendors, specials at downtown businesses, live music and art, amazing young entrepreneurs, a place to showcase a local non-profit each week and a Kids Corner with free activities for our youngest guests. It's an incredible gathering where neighbors happily greet friends and family and where out-of-town visitors come to discover our delightful downtown.