Tricia Spaulding

Dax Lyle, 10, rakes leaves in a cemetery behind Alps Road Elementary School on Monday morning for the annual MLK Day of Service.

 To celebrate, the 23-year-old went to work on her morning off - filling boxes with carrots at the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia. Reed could think of no better way to spend her day off than by volunteering.

► Click HERE to see a gallery of volunteers on MLK Day

"It's a really good project to work on," she said. "I came here last year, too, so I know the good they do here."

Hundreds of volunteers like Reed came to 24 job sites around Athens on Monday, chipping in a few hours for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service organized by HandsOn Northeast Georgia.

Some volunteers planted gardens and painted walls while others cleaned up graffiti and restored graveyards.

A group of students from the Navy Supply Corps School built an obstacle course on the Clarke Central High School campus for JROTC students.

"This was a chance to promote physical fitness and help some school kids out," said Bryan Vaughn, one of the Navy school students. "Anything to help and promote physical fitness is a good thing."

Across the field, Mary and Guy Hall and their 10-year-old daughter, Serena, built wood borders and spread mulch around pits for new pull-up bars for JROTC.

The Walton County family came to Athens to volunteer with HandsOn Northeast Georgia, a participant in Walt Disney World's "Give a Day, Get a Disney Day" program. The program gives a ticket to a Disney theme park to each volunteer who signs up.

The Halls plan to go to The Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., in February for the first time.

"It's really a double blessing for us," Mary Hall said. "We get to help people, and we get to take a family vacation to Disney."

Several Athens schools hosted volunteer projects, as did community agencies like Habitat for Humanity, the Athens-Clarke County Greenways and Riverside Parks, and BikeAthens.

Downtown, Keep Athens Beautiful officials armed volunteers with scrapers and Goo Gone glue remover to remove old stickers and posters off streetlights, posts and trash cans.

On East Clayton Street, Steven Scarboro, Wanda Weldon and Jim Sykes from Georgia Power Co. scrubbed white stickers and tape off the side of a newspaper box.

"This is kind of following what Dr. King talked about as far as volunteerism and giving back to the community," said Sykes, vice president of Georgia Power's northeast region.

Corey White and about 15 other members of the Black Student Union at UGA dedicated their work at the food bank to King.

The student group packaged nearly 700 boxes of food to send out to families across the region.

"It's about commemorating the importance of this day," said White, 22. "I wanted to do something that's bigger than myself on a day like this."