Leadership Eastside (LE) has selected Redmond’s Friends of Youth and Woodinville’s Homeward Pet Adoption Center as the first recipients of LE’s new “Serve Our Community” contest. The Friends of Youth project will focus on the agency’s Youth Haven Bellevue shelter.

The two non-profits, chosen from six applicants, will receive donated expertise and labor from graduates of the Eastside’s premier community leadership program.

The Youth Haven Bellevue shelter provides homeless and runaway girls (ages 7-17) with immediate safety and basic needs. LE volunteers will create an additional bedroom in the shelter and increase the facility’s curb appeal by removing existing bushes and replanting with aesthetically pleasing plants, stripping and re-staining the front deck and power washing the driveway.

The Homeward Pet Shelter will receive LE’s volunteer assistance with an annual fundraiser auction scheduled for the Seattle Waterfront Marriott on February 26, 2011. LE will be helping set up their annual fundraiser.

The “Serve Our Community” contest grew out of an LE-sponsored day in May 2010 when more than 30 LE graduates spent an afternoon helping Hopelink organize its new 18,700-square-foot food bank center in Kirkland that is based on a grocery store model of distribution.

“Donating time and expertise is one way LE plans to show appreciation to local nonprofits for improving the community,” said LE Board Chair Earl Bell.

LE is involved with training community leaders since 2005.

More information is available here.