Omer Jenkins has devoted his life to others.

The College Station man is a father, a teacher and a volunteer.

For his service to others, Omer Jenkins is now a Jefferson Award winner for outstanding public service in our community.

He may say he's not worthy to receive such an award, but just ask his friends, they say he is more than deserving.

"It's sometimes jobs just need doing and you may not be able to be really good at it, but you can at least keep it going until you find somebody who can really do it right," Omer Jenkins said.

Omer Jenkins has kept a lot of programs going throughout the years. Kiwanis, Brazos Beautiful, AARP Tax Aide and Mended Hearts just to name a few.

During the spring, you'll find Omer at the Larry J. Ringer Library helping people file their taxes. It's only one of the organizations keeping this retired Texas A&M University professor busy.

The organization maybe the closest to his heart, Mended Hearts. It's a program where heart disease survivors visit others going through the same thing.

Every other day Omer visits St. Joseph Regional Health Center in Bryan to give heart surgery patients hope.

"You have no idea what it's like to walk into someone's hospital room that's just had bypass surgery and think their life is at an end and convince them it's not," Jenkins said. "You will be back to normal, even better, the scars won't show much who cares. You walk out with that feeling that you've accomplished something at a minimal effort."

Omer doesn't give himself credit for the things he's done, including stepping into leadership roles when no one else volunteered.

"Like most things in life no one wants to be president or leader so I took that on," Jenkins said. "Not that I did a good job at it, but I kept it moving until we found someone that would do a good job of it."

Omer didn't do a good job, he did a great job. Just ask his friends.

"He doesn't do things to call attention to himself which is a very consistent theme which you hear from people who have worked with him," Omer's friend Maggie Charleton said. "Larry Ringer who knows Omer through Kiwanis said if you want something done you give it to Omer Jenkins and he'll get it done and he will not need attention for getting it done, he'll just get it done."

Omer is a humble man.
When asked about receiving the Jefferson Award for outstanding public service in our community, this is what he said.

"Why me? I know too many other people who are doing more by far than I am," Jenkins said. "I think of this as a life long honor that I've done it a lot of years. Haven't done a lot at any particular time, but I kept doing it I suppose."

And he'll keep giving back to a community that has given him so much. Omer has called Bryan-College Station home for 45 years.
His friends say this community wouldn't be the same without him.

"He's just a very unsung community volunteer and teacher," Charleton said. "Because he's so quiet a lot of what he does doesn't get recognized. He doesn't seek that recognition, he just deserves it."

Another friend wrote that Omer is "the volunteer." He's always there, quietly seeing that things get done.

"Everybody can do a little something. It doesn't take much to do a little something and it makes you feel good," Jenkins said.