The King Daddy of Kool-Aid

Betsy and Preston enjoy one of Preston’s signature Kool-Aid blends.

The flood of May 2010 brought many hidden blessings and one of them was Preston Bailey. Before the flood, we were amiable acquaintances. Preston would come by and pick up household items for his nonprofit, Welcome Home Ministries. But after the flood, when the Chicks were in full-on flood relief and recovery mode, Preston became a general in the battlefield.  Most of his efforts had nothing to do with his day job.

Preston found people who needed help. Anywhere and everywhere. He worked through his church. He worked through his fraternity. And he worked through his wide array of social connections. Because of his devotion to a duty he felt called to, we’ve seen a lot of Preston the last two years. And we felt we knew him fairly well. We had truly become friends.

So it was with some surprise that, during one of his visits, he mentioned his love of Kool-Aid. Really? Kool-Aid? “It is my one point of vanity,” he said. As it turns out, Preston is a Kool-Aid connoisseur. Just drinking the stuff is way too simple. He mixes his own flavors from the various packets of powder. Grape lemonade is a favorite.

“You want me to bring you some Kool-Aid?” he asked. Why, of course! So last week, Preston arrived with a gallon jug of grape lemonade Kool-Aid. And after one sip, I understood his passion for it. That sweet powdery drink takes you back to childhood. It’s a hot summer day, you’ve just gotten done with a rousing game of kickball and your mom brings out a frosty pitcher of Kool-Aid.

We drank our Kool-Aid and smiled. As I said, the flood brought us many hidden blessings.

Dollar General

Well, we just have to tell you about the most extraordinary thing. We are always in the market for underwear and socks for the many people our partner agencies serve who routinely go without those necessities. Most people don’t understand that food stamps are only good for food. No shampoo, no diapers, no laundry detergent. And no socks or underwear.

So our good friends at Dollar General provide us with those basics from time to time. A few weeks ago, we got a call to go to the Dollar General display store to pick up undies and, they said, there were a few other things we might like to have.

So Betsy and I head to the store and are greeted by the nicest guys, Doug and Jason, who look around an area set up like a Dollar General store and say, “Take what you need.”  I am starting to have heart palpitations. This is unbelievable. We’re going to need a few more boxes.

So here’s just a portion of the CRC warehouse loaded with Dollar General goodies for our partners. It took Betsy and I five hours to hoover out the Dollar General store and then a few days with volunteer help to sort it all. We loved every single minute of it.

So who gets all this fabulous stuff? More than 80 nonprofits that partner with the Community Resource Center on behalf of their clients. And I’d like to show you a few of them.

This is Preston in the green shirt. He runs a nonprofit, Welcome Home Ministries, that helps ex-offenders become productive members of society again. He’s always looking for clothes his guys can wear to job interviews and we hooked him up with brand new Dollar General men’s shirts. The fella in the yellow shirt is David from Youth Encouragement Services, which runs three youth centers for kids up to age 18. The centers keep kids off the street after school, on weekends and on summer vacations.  David is always in need of everything, from cleaning supplies to clothes for his kids. Without us, he’d have to spend money from his program budget.

The woman in white is Della from the Mental Health Cooperative. Her agency serves more than 5,000 people with persistent mental illness.  In February, when we had that brutal cold snap, we gave her socks to take out to her homeless clients. Today, she was so excited to see all the cleaning supplies donated by Dollar General. The woman in the black sweater is Deb from Alive Hospice. She also loves the cleaning supplies and the little knick knacks that brighten up a patient’s room.

I wish I could take a photo of every one of our partners. They are on the front lines of poverty and, let me tell you, that can be a pretty daunting place to be. The Community Resource Center is the supply line to those on the front lines.

Dollar General is one of the giants. We are privileged to serve because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Brain power

The faces of mental illness are many. Confusion. Despair. Loneliness. Alienation. These are the people you cross the street to avoid. They’re the ones who talk to the voices in their heads, sometimes very loudly. They’re the ones who probably haven’t seen a shower in awhile. Right Guard is not on their list of essentials.

The Mental Health Cooperative embraces these people. And they have taken a radical approach to helping them out of isolation and into the mainstream of society.

MHC is housed in a sprawling complex in Metro Center. It’s a one-stop shop for everything helpful to those suffering from mental illness. There is a clinic. There is a pharmacy for filling prescriptions. There are case workers who are available to their consumers, as they are known, on a daily basis. There is job training and recovery programs and, most of all, acceptance.

In the most severe cases, MHC offers daily care to their consumers. Betsy and I toured MHC last week and watched a video of a man who had been institutionalized his entire life. His case worker was taking him to the grocery store. Yes, he had those voices and he talked to them quite often during his trip down the aisles. But  he also conversed normally with those around him and had no trouble picking out his groceries. Imagine what that man might be like today if he had real care when he was younger.

If the consumers can’t get to MHC, the services travel to them. MHC even has a psychiatrist who visits homeless consumers and can write and fill a prescription on the spot.

The staff of 400 serves more than 6,000 clients in Middle Tennessee. They are all about inclusion and breaking down barriers for those who cannot walk through some doors on their own.

Looks like a Picasso to us

Betsy and I just love presents. We are blessed to receive, from time to time, sweet potatoes from someone’s garden or a jar of chocolates at Christmas. Our nonprofit partners are like family to us and we’re glad they feel the same.

But it’s truly special when we get a gift made by the people our nonprofits serve.  So we were just tickled when Friend’s Life brought us a painting done by their clients.

Friends Life serves developmentally delayed teenagers and adults. They work with their challenged friends to integrate them socially and professionally into the every day world. There are job training classes. There are exercise classes. There are fun activities like bowling. And there are manners and social etiquette classes (can we join those?).

We have been helping out Friends Life with some badly needed office furniture. When they came to pick up some desks and office chairs this week, they brought us the painting.

We really get back more than we give in our line of work. That painting? It looks like a Picasso to us.

God boxes

It is a bitterly cold day, this first day of the January Giveaway. But the first people to arrive (aside from Johnny Webb, the pastor from Kingdom Vision, who is always here bright and early) before 9 a.m. is John Smith from the Community Outreach Partnership of Bedford County. It’s a brand new organization and Mr. Smith and a few colleagues have come to see if CRC would be of use to them. It took them about five minutes to realize that we could offer a lot of help.

COPBC has a building, but that’s about it. They need everything – chairs, tables, file cabinets, you name it. We are all about office furniture and today we hooked them up with a lot of office chairs.

The idea behind COPBC is a good one. Amass all the services offered by various Bedford County charities under one umbrella organization. COPBC offers grant writing, fund raising, employment training, a database of every service offered in Bedford County and fraud protection. This last one is what got my attention the most. In Bedford County, as in most places these days, shysters can go from one agency to the next asking for the same thing whether it be food, clothing or rent money. None of the agencies may know that these same people  have been helped multiple times with no assurance they’re actually needy. Obviously, that drains resources from people who are really in need.

If you think this kind of thing isn’t a problem, let me tell you it is. We once found items donated to CRC for the needy in a yard sale in Columbia.

So COPBC has distributed flyers to churches and other nonprofit agencies directing those who ask for help to come to COPBC, which will aggregate all the charitable resources and distribute them. One flyer. If the same guy shows up more than once, he’s busted. Not really, but you get the picture.

So, the God boxes. I asked John how COPBC is raising money. Coffee can by coffee can. They take coffee cans labeled “God boxes” to churches, businesses and any place else that might bring a contribution. In these times, people may not be able to write a big check, but they can throw a dollar or two in a God box. Those dollars are starting to add up. And John Smith is going to make sure they get spent in the most equitable way.

The tree of life

We are the “supply line” to troops battling on the front lines. We like to visit with our partner agencies to see first hand the struggles they contend with every day. Yesterday, we went to the Room In The Inn, a program that serves chronically homeless people. It was inspiring, to say the least.

Room In The Inn has multiple programs serving the homeless, including overnight lodging at area churches, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, a new transitional living facility currently under construction and a day area where the homeless can just relax, watch television or use a computer.

But we were blown away by the art program. Some would say pain fuels art. It certainly does at Room In The Inn. The walls of the building are studded with unspeakably beautiful art. The art room holds pottery and sculpture. The Room In The Inn holds an annual art show and supplements its budget with the proceeds.

Now, to the Tree of Life. It is a collection of leaves, painted with the names of those homeless people whose pain has now been ended by death.

Karen Stevens, the special projects coordinator at the Inn, was telling us about a woman who just got added to the tree. She had been homeless for 20 years. Someone found her lifeless body under a trestle not 100 feet from the Inn. Betsy asked if she died from the cold. No, Karen said, the harshness of her life finally caught up with her.

Most people tend to look away when confronted with a homeless person. But this visit was a revelation to me. Many of them greeted us as if we’d just stopped by for a cup of coffee. One gentleman sitting in the TV room said hello in an impeccably British accent. But, clearly, he was not British. How oddly delightful.

Nardos

Nardos Matusala has been coming to CRC for a long time. She works for a nonprofit, Quality Living, that provides services for people with special needs. I’d always wondered about Nardos’ accent, but until this week I didn’t know the dramatic story that has been her life.

Nardos was born in Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa. She was born in the midst of a war between Ethiopia, which had taken over her country, and Eritrean freedom fighters. She remembers her family running from her home to a hole in the yard for shelter whenever they heard planes overhead. To this day, she shutters when she hears the sound of an airplane.

When she was eight, Nardos’ family fled Eritrea. Her  mother put two sets of clothes on Nardos and her four sisters and they literally walked for a month to a refugee camp in Somalia where they spent the next three years.

The family arrived in the United States in 1982. They were placed in an apartment in Philadelphia where they knew no one.  They were afraid to go outside. On their first Fourth of July in America they cowered when fireworks went off, thinking for a second that they were being bombed.

In college, Nardos was asked to write a paper on her childhood. She wrote a paragraph. When the teacher read it, he asked her to write more. Six pages of fear, repression and anxiety emerged.

Today, Nardos is anxious to return to Eritrea for a visit. Her brother, not yet born when the family came to America, doesn’t understand the struggle the family endured. She wants him to understand how precious freedom is.

America has many faces and stories. Sometimes, sitting at the dock door waiting to load bleach and detergent into a van, I get to hear one of them.

The girls from Bedford County

Mary, Robin, Leta and Joyce are the girls from Bedford County. We just love them. They all run different nonprofits, but they’re all in each other’s business.  Joyce is the heart of Caregiver’s Relief, which helps people who have to take care of relatives with long-term memory issues such as Alzheimer’s. Mary and Leta help autistic children and their families through the Bedford County Association of Exceptional Students and Robin runs the People’s Church Food Bank.

But as I said, they’re all in each other’s business. They help each other by volunteering, during fundraisers, and just with the general moral support everyone needs when their stress-o-meters go off.  They always carpool up to Nashville for the giveaways and then have lunch afterward.

Leta was telling  Betsy and me about one of their miracle days last week. All nonprofits have miracle days. It’s one of the reasons we do what we do. The Exceptional Students are going to have their own Christmas Giveaway for families with autistic children. Many of their families are in profound need because on top of astronomical medical bills, some of them have lost jobs because of the Recession (and, by the way, when can we just call this a Depression because, from where I’m sitting, that’s what it is down here at the bottom of the economic barrel).

But I digress. Their miracle was finding Shelley Lewis at the Stor-N-Lock in Shelbyville. They need space to store all the gifts they’re going to give away. Shelley not only offered them space at no charge, but also offered to loan them a truck to come pick up all the CRC Christmas Giveaway stuff. So a big shout-out to Shelley and her husband, Ed. If you need to store some stuff in the Shelbyville area, you go see them.

And if you just need a good giggle, you need to be at CRC when the girls from Bedford County are here.  Robin, Leta, Joyce and Mary are their very own floor show.

Go Eagles!

If you’re in need of a lump-in-your-throat, three-hankie post, this just in from Joan Anderson, an administrator at Project Reflect, one of CRC’s partner nonprofits. Project Reflect, co-founded by Sister Sandra Smithson, just started a middle school this year to pair with its elementary school. 2009 was the inaugural year of the middle school’s football program.

“What a game last night! Project Reflect’s Smithson Craighead Academy Middle School won the city public-middle-school championship for football last night in a 20-6 game against J.T. Moore held at Hunters Lane High school. The dark, cold night put no chill on the exciting play on the field. J.T. Moore had not lost a game in three years. SCA’s team, cheerleaders, and drum corps were outstanding.

Following the game, the captain of the SCA football team collected the trophy, walked up to Sister Sandra with team in tow, gave the trophy to her and said, “Sister Sandra, this is for you.”  She said, “Thank you so much for this gift. But this trophy belongs to you and the team, and I want you to keep it to remind you of what you can achieve.” So today we hope to order a trophy case for SCA Middle School’s first trophy.

Please join in celebrating this win for the kids. And pray that they win big this year in the classroom, too.”

These kids will be winners in the classroom as well as on the field because Sister Sandra and her dedicated staff will make sure of that.

Senior Power!

We have a lot of senior centers that partner with CRC. And one of the comforting things I’ve learned over the years is that all of them are actually run by seniors. There’s probably a politically correct name for seniors now, like “advanced citizens” or “people who are just smarter than me.”  But don’t think they sit around playing bingo (although that would be fun every now and again). This is Marianne Watson. She runs the Perry County Council on Aging and she has the most piercing blue, blue eyes you’ve ever seen. She and her husband, Tom, were at CRC today getting a massive desk set someone donated for her new office.

Marianne is embarking on a major building campaign, renovating an old factory building for a new senior center. That’s remarkable in itself in this rotten economy. But a side product of her project is that she will be putting people to work. Perry County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. More than 20 percent of the county’s residents are out of work.  That sad fact even caught the attention of the New York Times, which published an article about the county’s economic struggles.

Marianne is in the trenches every day, not only serving her clients but helping to boost her community’s spirits. Nice work at any age.