Photos by John Nation
A well-ordered community has to have its high-profile movers and shakers — its political and business leaders, its big philanthropists and gifted fund-raisers.
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Octogenarian Meals on Wheels volunteer Gene Heustis. |
The thought is repeated by others across the city. "No, we couldn’t get along without volunteers," says Senlin Ward, executive director of Dress for Success, an organization that gives disadvantaged women clothing and other help to reach stabilizing jobs and lifestyles. "They’re the ones who do all the work."
According to Sara Jo Hooper, development director at United Crescent Hill Ministries, volunteers in her agency’s Meals on Wheels program provide not only physical nourishment, but also important and sometimes life-saving social contact as well.
So Louisville Magazine decided to go out and round up a few good examples for recognition. These particular people aren’t necessarily saints. They probably won’t go down in history. Others may do as much or more than they do. They’re just regular people. But they are the kind of people who, in unsung thousands, give generously of their time to try to make a difference, and in the process help people who need it, spreading hope. They give do-gooders a good name.
Two-Way Caterer
Gene Heustis is a genial, avuncular man who has many friends in Crescent Hill from years as the operator of a Frankfort Avenue service station, and from longtime participation in neighborhood organizations.
On Tuesdays, he goes to the United Crescent Hill Ministries building, off Frankfort at State Street, and picks up seven to 10 hot meals in insulated containers, then heads out on his Meals on Wheels route. He drives his own aging gray Volvo station wagon, using his own gas, around a route with stops at the Masonic Home in St. Matthews and in Reservoir Park and other Crescent Hill districts near the service station he used to run. He takes the meals to elderly people who have trouble getting out. He’s 81 years old himself. "We gain and lose a few each week, so they sometimes have to rearrange the routes a bit," he says.
The people expect him. They often are waiting in wheelchairs. He brings nutritious meals prepared by Masterson’s Catering under a contract with Louisville Metro government, which gets the money through the federal Older Americans Act and enlists organizations such as United Crescent Hill Ministries to get the food to the people. UCHM asks volunteers to heat the food, and others to deliver it.
The volunteers deliver more than food. Sometimes, says UCHM executive director Sue Gentry, the Meals on Wheels carrier is the only person a shut-in will see all day. "I like to talk to the people," Heustis says. "I bring information that can help. We have an organization here, UCHM, that can do just about anything they need."
The talk often turns to ailments. "My problem is knees," Masonic Home resident Vivian Villwock told him recently. "But my back problem has come on. It’s degenerative arthritis. I can’t stand and cook. It started with a cat scratch when I was 12. That turned into a staph infection, and I was treated for six months with mercury. The main problem is mercury poison." Villwock is 79.
Jeanne Willett’s story is similarly dismal. Willet, 75, lives in Reservoir Park and is a former teacher who used to take her car to Heustis’ station. She had a stroke on the last day of school in 1991. She fell to the floor and couldn’t move. She had shut her classroom door, so nobody knew she was in there. Willett happened to have a whistle, and she blew it repeatedly, but those who heard it said later they assumed it was kids playing. She had to lie there until the cleaning lady found her.
The trick for the delivery person seems to be to keep things light. Heustis listens in a friendly, sympathetic way, but he doesn’t shudder or gasp or become melancholy or gloomy. He has a smile that comes naturally in conversation with anybody, and it comes up a lot on his route. He looks for openings for humorous remarks and often finds them.
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Showing civic class (clockwise from top left): Heustic making a Meals on Wheels delivery; Mack selecting a Dress for Success suit; Urban Spirit’s DeMars Conrad discussing poverty-immersion; and Zalph teaching bike repair. | |
Sometimes there are plenty of other things to talk about. Recipient Jerry Richards suffered a head injury in an accident years ago that destroyed his balance, so he "can’t walk five feet." He uses a motorized wheelchair. Richards is 65 but he looks like he’s 45. He attributes his appearance to vitamins; he’s a vitamin aficionado. Heustis says he would like to learn more about vitamins, but he’s reluctant because he had heart surgery a few years ago and he has to take too many pills already. In conversation, Heustis gets as well as gives.
It is supposed to take Heustis about an hour to make his rounds, but it often takes longer, because of the talk. He eventually finishes and totes the insulated containers back to UCHM, where the other volunteers are long gone.
His meals, Richards says, are "a tremendous help" to people like him.
"I don’t know what I’d do without them," says Vivian Villwock.
Paying It Forward
Alexis Mack serves on the board of directors of Dress for Success Louisville, helping disadvantaged women prepare themselves to apply for and take on productive jobs. She gets them into suitable clothes as the name implies, but that’s just the start of it. Mack is a valuable storehouse of knowledge, ready to be tapped by women who want to "raise themselves up." She came by much of her expertise the hard way.
She is herself a graduate of the organization’s Professional Women’s Group program, which guides women through resume writing and job interviews, teams them up with mentors, and generally gives them help finding a way to better circumstances. Mack, 46, knows what it’s like to need that proactive encouragement. She once had children removed from her home because of drug addiction, and had to go through a rehabilitation program to get them back. "I made some bad choices," she says. She has struggled through 10 years of schooling, sandwiching in study while taking care of six children and working to put food on the table.
She says she also knows what a difference it makes to take a positive point of view, and to be around positive people rather than negative ones. She has a good place to live now, with four children still at home, and the two who are out on their own in good jobs. So she’s giving back.
Besides her general support work at Dress for Success, she’s involved in projects there to provide appropriate purses to go with suits provided to participants, and to recruit successful African-American women to join the effort as mentors. She also is on the board of directors of the Jefferson Street branch of the YMCA of Greater Louisville, where she helps with children’s programs, membership recruitment and volunteer wrangling. She’s president of the parents committee of the Kenwood Missionary Baptist Church and leads a singles group there.
That’s all with a full-time job in members’ services at the Kentucky Telco Federal Credit Union — which, she says, "is sometimes like being a bartender" because it involves hearing and counseling people about their troubles. She has four active children still in school, up to their ears in basketball, cheerleading, homework and other school activities. She believes in hands-on parenting. "Most of the programs they’re involved in, I’m either volunteering, or . . . believe me, they know who I am," she says.
It all keeps her plenty busy, she says, "but it’s a good busy." To her, there is personal comfort in stepping outside herself to help somebody. "I like to feel I made a difference," she says. Working with people, she finds she learns as much as she teaches, she says, getting as much as she gives.
Mack still struggles financially, and concedes that she "could really stand to work another job." But that doesn’t fit her priorities. "I will not let the streets raise my kids," she says. "I don’t feel that kids need $100 tennis shoes. I want my kids to understand the whos in life, not the things in life."
She says it is the whos on both sides of the Dress for Success program and her other work — the people who work with her to help others, and the people who receive the help and often help the helpers by their response to it — that are important to her life.
Mr. Fix-It
The idea was straightforward enough: Round up some kids in a disadvantaged neighborhood and tell them they could earn bicycles of their own by coming to classes to learn about bicycle repairs and safety. You’d get people to donate bicycles that could be repaired and get a grant to cover some of the other expenses. When the kids had finished the program, they’d have bikes for exercise, which they would ride safely. Adult volunteers would lead them on rides in and beyond their neighborhoods. They also would have a positive experience under their belts from which they would learn that you can get things you want by working, and by perseverance and keeping to a schedule.
It sounded perfect to Barry Zalph, a 50-year-old mechanical engineer and bicycle scholar and enthusiast. When he first heard that funding might be available for such a project, Zalph blurted out, "I’ll run that." He was the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District’s delegate to the ACTIVE Louisville Partnership, an organization that aims to create energetic neighborhoods and more active and healthy citizens.
Zalph went around Smoketown and Phoenix Hill looking for rent-free space that would be accessible to those neighborhoods’ kids. He found an old church office that belongs to the Presbyterian Community Center in Smoketown, with a parking lot for cycling drills and room for bicycle storage, as well as workspace for young mechanics. The location also affords easy access to lightly traveled streets — a good place for children to practice new bike-handling skills.
The Presbyterian Center worked with Zalph and the Louisville Metro Housing Authority — which has access to the addresses of a lot of the targeted kids — to get the word out. The program would require about 40 hours of attention — 10 hours of safety instruction, 12 hours of repair instruction, and 12 to 20 hours of actually working on bikes the kids would ride out on when they’d finished the program. Zalph got bikes from friends of his in the Louisville Bicycle Club and from TARC, another ACTIVE Louisville Partner. "People abandon them on the bus racks," Zalph says. TARC stores them in a basement, and if they are still there 30 days later, it donates them to his project, which the ACTIVE Louisville website calls the Smoketown Youth Bicycle Repair and Education program.
The whole thing sounded good to a bunch of kids, too. They showed up at the center and took home forms to sign up. But then there was a snag. Not too many brought the paperwork back. And fixing up a bike you can keep sounds good until you find out you actually have to stay in a shop and work for hours. So when the program’s first semester ended in the spring of 2005, only one boy had earned a bike. He was Dewight Lacey, Zalph says, 12 at the time and a kid who "wanted a bike and would jump through whatever hoops it took to get one."
A program like Zalph’s has to crawl before it can walk and walk before it can run, and a kid like Dewight is sometimes what it needs to get going. That fall, 10 kids joined the program, including Dewight again (who wanted another bike) and four friends he brought with him. Again there was a lot of attrition, but Dwight and three of his friends earned bikes. "The other boy was grounded so often he couldn’t get his hours in," Zalph says.
This past spring three more earned bikes. In the interest of improving program results, Zalph is looking for adult volunteers from the neighborhood, thinking the children will find them easier to identify with. The kids seem to like him and a mechanic he hired well enough, he says, "but they don’t aspire to be like us." To draw those volunteers, Zalph plans to offer classes for adults.
He’s set up a nonprofit organization called Bicycling for Louisville that also teaches adults safety and handling skills, and promotes cycling in general. Zalph is a true believer, especially when it comes to children. "For a kid, a bike is really a source of freedom," he says. "You get a real sense of your own capabilities when you start riding longer distances. It expands your sense of your world and expands your sense of yourself."
Reality Checker
We could no doubt debate whether people who give of themselves to improve the lives of others are born, not made, but the Rev. Deborah DeMars Conrad is doing her best to make some. She tries to make them out of believers, or, to be precise, people of faith of all persuasions. She is pastor of Urban Spirit, a church in the Portland neighborhood that has no denomination and no parishioners. Or I should say no permanent parishioners.
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Not a teacher by career but trained to be one, Fran Fargen tutors disadvantaged children at the Americana Community Center. |
Urban Spirit brings people who are not poor, from non-urban settings, into a poor neighborhood and basically shows them how the other half lives. The idea is to make them more aware of what urban poverty is like, to better enable them to follow religious doctrine about serving the needy. "People of faith have an obligation," Conrad says, "to examine their holy scriptures and see if having poor people around just to ignore is OK."
Her church brings people from everywhere — Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nebraska and Indiana, to name a few home states of participants — in groups of from six to 60, and explores with them the role of religion in a modern urban setting. The length of its sessions varies between two hours and a week, and there are offerings to fit about any time span in between. "Whatever time you have, we can use," Conrad says.
While they learn, especially in the longer sessions, participants serve. They do outreach work for agencies in the neighborhood, such as helping children read, painting walls, distributing food and leaflets, and helping with after-school programs and aid to the elderly. The week-long session is a poverty-immersion experience that operates out of Urban Spirit’s home base, an old Lutheran church and parsonage at 26th and Bank Streets that lost its dwindling congregation in 2001. Participants live in the church and the parsonage. They read and listen, and go forth on errands around the neighborhood, mostly within walking distance of the church. One exercise takes them around town, via TARC, on a sort of scavenger hunt, in search of a list of things that people who are poor t/files/storyimages/to have to ask for. "They find out what it’s like to dep/files/storyimages/on the kindness of agencies and strangers," Conrad says.
Back at the church, they are put on meager rations and invited to make choices like those poor people face every day. They start with habitation space limited to a section of floor in the church basement. By using Urban Spirit dollars earned through the work they do with the agencies, they can move from the floor to such amenities as beds and showers. They are given a finite amount of food and must use it wisely. Teachers throw in complications occasionally so participants "have to deal with life’s surprises."
On the last day, they talk about how they can take what they’ve learned back home and use it to become better neighbors and better advocates for the less fortunate. Conrad says the next step in the evolving program will be a post-graduate course in how to become an agent for change in an urban community, prepared for people who have been through poverty immersion.
Conrad, 46, is an ordained Lutheran minister who served as pastor at several churches in Texas and Kentucky before taking a job on a bishop’s staff in Indianapolis. She developed the Urban Spirit program as part of a church study on the exodus of congregations from urban areas and on ways churches can become more relevant there.
The Urban Spirit slogan, motto and succinct vision statement is, "Changing the World by Changing the Way We See the World."
Bathtubs to Blank Slates
Fran Fargen, 43, is trained as a middle school teacher, but he works as a restorer of vintage bathtubs. Teaching 35 kids in one room, he says, was not his bag. It wasn’t the kids. He likes kids. He proves it a couple of times a week at the Americana Community Center in Louisville’s immigrant-rich South End.
If you go there, you can see that the kids like him, too. He sat with a reporter in the cafeteria one recent evening, and tables nearby soon filled up with young girls, chattering away in various forms of English and other languages, calling to Fargen and vying with one another to get responses from him.
"Hey, Mr. Basketball Player," one girl called. Fargen recognized her as one of a handful who worked briefly at getting a basketball team together after he started volunteering at the center early last year. The team didn’t shape up exactly as he had hoped, but he believes there will be a team eventually — when he figures out exactly how to approach the project with the children and facilities he has to work with.
"I like to coach beginners; they’re like a blank slate," he said. "They believe what you tell them, and they don’t have any bad habits yet." He had plenty of beginners at the center, but they were a blank slate in more ways than one. Many were not too familiar with, he said, "any kind of structure." The acoustics in the gymnasium didn’t help with the problem. Two or three basketballs being dribbled at the same time s/files/storyimages/thunder through the rafters, and make coaching sound like "any other kind of noise."
So far, Fargen has learned more about his clientele than they have about basketball. "I had to reduce my expectations," he said. "I had to increase my tolerance for inattentiveness. I think you have to have a persona as a coach: ‘What I say goes.’ It was frustrating to me not to have that respected."
"Sometimes you have to make your goals realistic for where you are," he said, adding, "The key to success in anything is to keep trying."
He does tutoring at the center, in math and other subjects. He and other volunteers go to the library, and children come to them with questions. Fargen likes that a lot. He did a bit of library detail on that recent night, and then went down to the gym. It was opened to children who had studied or been tutored at least 20 minutes that night, and who had handed-out tickets to prove it. Soon there were children and balls all over the floor. Some of the older boys had a game of sorts going at one basket, while some others were doing more or less random shooting and rebounding at the other end. Some girls were playing volleyball with an imaginary net in the middle of the gym, and some smaller boys were kicking a small green ball all over the gym. They would laugh hysterically when it bounced off the bleachers and across the floor. Some smaller girls had organized a game of bleachers-jumping, climbing to the top seats and then leaping as a group about three feet to the floor. It was impossible to hear yourself think in the room, but everybody seemed to be having a rollicking good time.
Fargen said he admires the people who have jobs working at the center. "I have the freedom of being a volunteer," he said. "I don’t have the obligation. I’m here because I want to be here. To me it’s a bigger sacrifice to do this full time as a means of livelihood."
And if it doesn’t all go as planned at first, he said, "it’s just a greater challenge."
Spoken like a dedicated do-gooder.
