THROOP #- Love was in the air as the Throopsville Community Church played host to a Valentine's Day dinner and dance celebration hosted by the church's Heavenly Angels youth group. The group which has existed in various incarnations for the past six years, is a community-minded organization that gets children involved in activities with an eye toward making a good strong community.

“The kids are involved in things like the food pantry,” Rhonda Trumbul, an adult leader of the group, said. “They collect food and put it in boxes. And they do things like shovel out driveways for elderly community members or in the summer yard work and things like that. They are a well behaved, well-rounded group.”

Over the past year, the group, that includes 15 members, has hosted a number of dances and other activities geared toward the youth in the Throop and surrounding community.

“We didn't have anything like this,” Carmina Nichols, 15, president of the group, said. “So we wanted to put together a youth group to do dances and things like this and it has been going really well.”

Over the past year, the kids have played host to a variety of events, including raising funds for a trip to New York City and Washington D.C.

“This is one of their fundraisers,” Trumbul said. “They'd really like to visit places like the (National) Mall (in Washington D.C.) and ground zero in New York City and they'd like to get to see a Yankees game, too.”

Everyone pitched in to get the dinner up and running.

“The kids were really wonderful in getting all of this together,” Trumbul said. “The kids put a lot of work into this, cleaning up and getting ready for tonight and it has worked out really well, they are really happy and excited about it.”

The group collectively put in a lot of time and planning to prepare for this event and execute the dinner, from preparation to service to greeting people as they came through the door, the whole night was in the children's hands.

“It was a lot of fun,” Mackenzie Trumbul, 16, treasurer of the group, said. “It was a long and stressful process to get everything together, but it was a lot of fun to do it too and get all of this together.”

The group, with help from some adult members of the church, prepared a spaghetti and meatball dinner and hosted a dance with music by DJ Bill.

“We decided to open it up to adults this time, too,” Mackenzie said. “We wanted to try to get more people out and make it a really fun event. We thought it would be a lot more fun that way. We haven't got as many people as we'd like, but I think we are all still having fun with this.”

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the whole evening for the young organizers, was simply seeing it all come together successfully.

“There was a lot to do,” Nichols said. “But everything is in the right place and we all did this together, that made it a lot of fun.”