What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [117]
Often the very people HGRM helps return to volunteer. A decade after he was ordered to do community service at HGRM by a local court, Bob Zink, a forty-year-old mason, continues to volunteer and supervise pickups three days a week. “Every once in a while, they’d give me a call, and I’d go help pick up a sofa, a bed, or a washing machine. Now, it’s nonstop. But if they need anything, all they have to do is holler and I’ll do it for them.”
Despite the wish to keep the organization all volunteer, by 2008 its growth demanded change. To avoid haphazard training, eliminate confusion, and maximize output, HGRM hired its first paid employee, a coordinator of volunteers. She is paid $43,000 out of a total annual budget of $228,000. One-third of that budget comes from the sale of high-quality goods volunteers discover amid the goods collected. (They count, in particular, on Bob Zink’s savvy eyes to find the gems.) The bulk of the budget goes for rent and to operate HGRM’s trucks.
Those who work closely with the couple are astonished by how well the Smiths get along, considering the grueling hours they have spent working together over the last twenty years. Their complementary styles, they say, make Barbara and Ira particularly effective: she is strategic and detail- and business-minded; he is, first and foremost, an emotional man who easily turns the personal connections he makes to the advantage of HGRM’s larger mission. Where Barbara thinks things through to their logical conclusion before attempting them, Ira experiments.
In late 2007, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs flew Barbara and Ira to San Diego to present them with the Secretary’s Award for outstanding achievement by a community organization in the service of homeless veterans. “This organization epitomizes the true spirit of charity and reciprocity in the original sense of the word,” Mary Fardy, the VA coordinator for homeless services in Bedford, Massachusetts, said of HGRM in her nominating letter. It “sustains the veterans we serve in both concrete and spiritual ways. The help is holistic. Those veterans that have been referred come back and tell us it is rare in their experience and circumstance to be treated as well as they have been at HGRM. They say that the compassion and support they receive from people in this agency is palpable and that they are awed by being seen as worthy human beings.”
In February 2009, HGRM was recognized, too, by Pine-Sol, which awarded it the annual $10,000 Powerful Difference Award grand prize.
At seventy-nine, the Smiths still go to work at the warehouse six days a week, fifty weeks a year. They take off only one week after Christmas when HGRM is closed and one week in July for Barbara’s family’s annual reunion. “I try to stay away from the counter and putter around in the back,” Ira said. For him, puttering entails working much of the day and often until 10 P.M. at home on HGRM’s database, which includes some 1,200 agency representatives. Barbara, too, has tried to restrain herself from shadowing the daily managers. But the truth is that the volunteers show great deference to both Barbara and Ira and, when they are present, depend on them. Barbara is the only one who knows which bed frame goes with which bed, one manager said, explaining why volunteers are constantly calling out to her. “Yes, I have that essential knowledge,” Barbara joked. “And I don’t pass it on. That makes me indispensable.”
It is impossible to doubt Ira or Barbara when they say they feel blessed that they have had the good fortune to do the work they have done for others. They radiate something as old-fashioned as niceness. It is rare that a client tries to take advantage of HGRM’s generosity. Barbara and Ira prefer to remember the day two women who were victims of severe domestic violence and had remained in a shelter for nearly two years arrived at the warehouse. They were with a social worker, helping them on her day off. “They timidly chose furniture and all the household goods they needed to furnish their two