KENTUCKY — Martin Luther King Jr's National Day of Service is observed each year on the third Monday in January as “a day on, not a day off.” 

MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer to improve their communities. 

Serve Kentucky is a state commission that provides federal grant funds to support community service programs across the Commonwealth.

Carie Kizziar is the program manager of Serve Kentucky, which is formerly known as the Kentucky Commission on Volunteerism and Service and joined In Focus Kentucky host Mario Anderson during this segment.

"Basically what we try to encourage AmeriCorp members to do on MLK Day is to find service outside of the normal service activity so for example, if you were a tutoring program and you might tutor students every day, we might ask you to maybe go serve at your local food pantry for the day. Or sometimes, Americorp members might actually decide to engage their students in MLK Day day of service and so they might have tutoring their students like they might normally do through literacy tutoring, they might then instead decide to do a civics lessons about an MLK day, about service to others and then maybe even potentially engage those students in service projects," says Kizziar.