Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Innovators: another chapter.

 

I am so lucky to know these amazing volunteer leaders. Tom Kondon, Gen Grewell, Althea Murphree-Crawley, Sean Murphy and Ethan Evans are all from very different walks of life, with very different missions. They share initiative, creativity, and passion for their communities:

 

 

Tom Kondon

Tom Kondon telling his story at a recent Volunteer Center event.

Tom Kondon is a teacher at Komachin Middle School in Lacey, Washington. He came to the Volunteer Center with an idea of how he could integrate service and learning for more than 800 students, which led to a day of service on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at the Volunteer Center that underscored the complex nature of our community’s strengths and weaknesses, and began the process of creating some lifelong volunteers.  The school’s agenda was to integrate service and learning – so the children did everything from make teen homeless packs and giggle bags for low-income families, to attend health and wellness classes and seminars about the earned income tax credit; it was service and learning, in one event.  They were introduced to people, topics, and issues they’d never seen. The testimonies that came out of the event are profound and moving, and ss part of this project, the middle schoolers starred in two videos that can now be found on our You Tube channel:

 http://www.youtube.com/user/VolunteerCenterLMT

 

 

Gen Grenwell

Gen Grewell (right) taking a break from washing feet at the Economic Survival Fair.

 

 

This winter Gen Grewell came to me with the idea to create a resource fair for anyone suffering from the downturn in the economy; seeing the need this fair could fulfill, Ballard agreed to coordinate the event. Grewell wanted the fair’s priority to be relevant and useful to people’s lives, so we convened a planning committee with the purpose of deciding what was most relevant. In April the committee, led by the Volunteer Center, convened more than forty vendors and service agencies and fifty volunteers for the Economic Survival Fair. Hundreds of people who were suffering from the downturn in the economy came to Olympia High School for free haircuts, free interview and business clothes, and access to countless agencies that can help. We also provided classes in financial literacy, nutrition, parenting, and saving money on utilities. At the end of the event everyone participated in a community lunch, sponsored by local businesses and run by volunteers. The fair was extraordinarily successful, and we are repeatedly getting requests from community members who would like to do their own events like it and consider ours a successful model they can learn from. We are in the process of developing a tool kit that can be useful to contribute to their success.

 

 

Althea Crawley-Murphree, Sean Murphy, and Ethan Evens

 

Part of the Olympia Project group at the GRuB Farm

This spring the Volunteer Center was approached by a group of young professionals who were struggling with the fact that they didn’t feel there was a place for them in Olympia. There is a strong community for older professionals and for those attending or working for the Evergreen State College, but nothing for those in between. Althea Crawley-Murphree is part of a growing number of young professionals in the Olympia area. She and her co-founders, Ethan Evens and Sean Murphy repeatedly ran into folks who asked each other if there was anyone in Olympia

who wasn’t a state worker or an Evergreen student. They were asking themselves where their community was and if there was even a place for them here. The three approached the Volunteer Center; we started a Facebook group, and began inviting people to participate. They stress to their members that there is no commitment needed – this is for fun and service and a sense of belonging. The next thing they knew they had 125 members, 30 people came to the first happy hour and 15 came to the first service project at the GRuB Farm (www.goodgrub.org) in Olympia. They love Olympia, and are using service to be social, make connections in the community, and make it a place they want to stay and live.

Volunteer Stories

Today we start the first of a multi-part series on volunteer leaders. There are countless people in our community who have taken initiative and give back in ways that multiply. These are their stories:

Wow, the Summer of Service is rolling along so fast! We’ve had a great couple of weeks. We went to Left Foot Organics with Governor Gregoire and her staff for the afternoon and helped them with their harvest for the week, and this weekend we led Eco-Impact Day, a service day for the environment at Tumwater Falls, the Woodland Trail, and the West Rocky Prairie. Volunteers from all walks of life were out with us pulling weeds and planting trees and cleaning up the environment so that it can be enjoyed by everyone in our community. After a hard day’s work in the unusually hot Pacific Northwest sun, we broke for a barbeque. Ah, summer.

The Woodland Trails Greenway Association has been in the process of creating multi-use trails throughout Olympia surrounded by green space for more than a decade. Our project was led by a long time volunteer named Jack Norton. After years of stressful 60-80 hour weeks in the software business, Norton decided he needed a change of pace. No more high-stakes deadlines, he decided. He was only going to teach. And he was going to make time to make an impact on his community.

Norton is a great teacher. He has a natural gift for providing the whole context for the work to be done just in the course of natural conversation. While we might have thought the work we did would only have a small impact, he was able to easily explain why that wasn’t the case. We were providing tree “tlc” for trees they wouldn’t get back to; because of us, these trees were going to grow to be big and strong. It only took the work we did in a couple of hours that morning and that was all they were going to need.

Norton didn’t realize at first that the Woodland Trail project would become such a huge part of his life; after decades in the software business he was really just looking for a refreshing change, and it was clear to him that the Woodland Trail really needed his help. The section we worked in was just one piece where they’d planted 1,000 trees. We passed another section of the trail where there were 1,500 plants thanks to their organization.

Given that Jack Norton’s background is as a project manager, it is no surprise that he has taken leadership in the Woodland Trails project. In addition to leading work parties, Jack has become involved in leadership of the organization and has been called into consult on similar projects in the area.

Like a true leader, when I chatted with Norton he was quick to mention other dedicated volunteers on the project: board members who are out on the trails every weekend, families who go out of weeding projects together, retired community members who are out there every day, and like a good leader, at the end of the day after congratulating us on a job well done he said: “we’re here every weekend! Come join us anytime.”

To learn more about the Woodland Trail Greenway Association, go to our website: www.volunteer.ws.