It Takes a Village
By Rhea Kaner Sullivan

Not all work earns us a paycheck. The following 1976 Washburn grads have found that volunteering can lead to new skills, citywide recognition, career changes, or even saving a life…

	Laurie Wessling Frevert

You can make a difference
While she was raising her two children, Laurie Wessling Frevert devoted herself to community activism. She has been extremely active in her neighborhood association (Hale Page Diamond Lake/HPDL) and in the city of Minneapolis. Her resume of volunteer activities is a full three pages long. Laurie has served as Vice Chair of the HPDL Board of Directors and on their Neighborhood Revitalization Program Steering Committee. She has worked on a wide range of projects – from the Bloomington Avenue bridge design, to a neighborhood community garden, to writing for her neighborhood newsletter. She is a block leader and a McGruff House volunteer. Laurie served for six years on the city’s Public Health Advisory Committee. In fact, November 16, 1999, was “Laurie Frevert Day” in Minneapolis, so named by then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton.

Laurie has also been involved at her children’s schools (Hale, Field and Southwest High School). Her most radical volunteer effort has been her involvement as President and board member of the Neighborhood Transportation Network – a light rail advocacy group. She even participated in a lawsuit with NTN and the Federal Transportation Department.

Laurie says that she will never regret her contributions to her community. “I have met a lot of wonderful people,” she says. “What I tell people is – instead of bellyaching, get involved. You can make a difference.”

Donna Lundy Fox

Volunteering: “my important work”
In 1999, when Donna Lundy Fox was working on completing her degree in psychology, she took an internship with the Crisis Connection, a nonprofit agency that provides free 24-hour crisis counseling by telephone. Basically it is a suicide prevention hotline designed to help keep people alive and connect them with the resources they need to turn their lives around. When Donna’s internship was over, she stayed on and became a volunteer in the Crisis Connection phone room where she worked one day a week (4-6 hour shift) as a crisis counselor. A few years later, she transitioned into working in the Crisis Connection’s Teen Education Program, speaking in school health classes about depression. For the past three years, she has been a member of the Crisis Connection’s Board of Directors and so has been actively involved in helping to keep the organization running and to get the word out about their services.

Donna’s “day” job is as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines, but she refers to her volunteer work for the Crisis Connection as “my important work.”

Providing shelter to those less fortunate
Anna Haak Lamb works as a manager for the Hennepin County Juvenile Court. Because her job is so far removed from the kids and families in the courtroom, she wanted to become more personally involved and have a more hands-on impact on children. Anna and her husband, Dale, also wanted to teach their daughter, Amy (an only child), what it’s like to “share your life and do something good to help others.” So she and Dale became shelter parents for the Washington County Crisis Nursery from 2000-2003.

Shelter parents volunteer to take children into their homes one weekend a month to prevent abuse and neglect and to provide a safety net for families living on the edge. Most of the kids are children of single mothers who have little or no support network. The first two girls they cared for were children whose mother was leaving an abusive father and needed a safe place for her children while she found a new apartment. The children were wary of Dale at first and the older child, who was 3 or 4, would not let her sister out of her sight. “You get a real sense of what these children go through in their daily lives,” Anna said.

Anna currently participates in a reading buddy program. Every Wednesday during the school year, she and 35-40 other Hennepin County employees (including judges, court staff, and attorneys) get on a bus on their lunch hour and go to the W. Harry Davis Academy on the Near North Side of Minneapolis to read for a half hour with fourth grade students “who are not stellar readers.” This one-on-one attention has improved test scores at the school.

Corporate support for community involvement
Volunteering is a value that Bradley Johnson and his wife, Peggy, would like to pass on to their children, so they look for volunteer opportunities that they can participate in as a family. Their daughter, Laura, hosted her eleventh birthday party at “Feed My Starving Children,” a Minnesota-based global hunger relief organization. Brad has also volunteered to support his daughters’ activities. He has coached their soccer teams, taught Sunday school at their church, and participated in school events like Sno-Fest and International Night.

Brad works at ING in Minneapolis where there is a great emphasis placed on community involvement for all employees. “We’re expected to use up to 40 hours of company time each year supporting the community.” Brad recently participated in painting the Pillsbury House Theatre and in a Junior Achievement fundraiser.

Teaching women to love the outdoors
Cindy Keating has lived on Lake Sarah in western Hennepin County for nearly 20 years. Lake living has shaped Cindy’s volunteer efforts. She volunteered on the Lake Sarah Improvement Association for a number of years – serving in all positions, including President. She worked on a state clean water partnership during that time and helped the association attain 501(c)(3) status.

One of Cindy’s passions is fishing. For years, she volunteered for Women Anglers of Minnesota (WAM), the first women’s fishing organization in the state of Minnesota. WAM does many volunteer kids’ fishing events and an annual women’s fishing tournament. Cindy served as President of WAM, worked to achieve 501(c)(3) status, and built a club of over 200 members. Cindy is currently Education Chair for Becoming an Outdoors Woman in Minnesota (BOW). BOW is an organization that is partially supported by the Minnesota DNR, and is dedicated to teaching women outdoor activities, including fishing, boat safety, rock climbing, hunting, archery, camping, and backpacking. BOW offers one day and weekend workshops in fishing and boating. Cindy finds great rewards in teaching women and kids something she loves to do. “I love to see the looks on their faces when they catch a fish or back a boat into the water perfectly!”

Volunteering into a new career
For Sue Rosenbloom Black, volunteer work led to a new career. Sue has done a lot of volunteering at her children’s Jewish Day School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For years she was on their marketing committee. She has also served on the board, helped teachers with art, math and Hebrew, assisted with fundraising, and served lunch. As a result of all of her volunteer efforts, the day school has hired her to be their first Admissions Director.

Another perk of volunteering for Sue has been that she has discovered skills that she never knew she had. One of those skills is sales. For the past seven years, Sue has run the Judaica shop at her temple. She does the ordering, scheduling of workers, training, display work, bookkeeping, and she also works there one day a week selling. Selling has proved to be a valuable skill for Sue’s work for the Jewish Day School. Though her title is “Admissions Director,” it is her job to go out and sell the school to parents in the community. In the process of doing that, she has learned another skill -- public speaking, something she “used to avoid like the plague.”

Fighting for justice

	Sheila Scott and Judge Boline

Sheila Scott was born into a family of volunteers. “Our family always volunteered for community and political issues,” she said. Sheila, an attorney, has donated her time and expertise to help people who cannot afford legal advice. She volunteers for Civil Society, an agency that helps immigrant victims of crime, especially human trafficking victims who have been forced into what amounts to slave labor. Sheila has supervised law students in a clinic at the Hennepin County Government Center, assisting people who have turned their lives around to have old criminal charges expunged from their records so that they can pursue new lives and careers.

Sheila has spent a lot of hours on the phone and at community activities dispensing free legal advice or referrals to folks who “just have a quick question.” She has also served on the board of her neighborhood association (Lind-Bohanon in Minneapolis) and created the Crime and Safety Committee, which operates a “stroll patrol” every spring-fall. She even ran for City Council in 1997.

“When one looks at all the wonderful things we have been given,” Sheila said, “it makes me want to give back, to help people who weren’t as fortunate as I was to grow up in a nurturing family, have the opportunity to go to good schools, like Washburn, and on to college.”

	About the Author...
			Rhea Kaner Sullivan has a huge appreciation for volunteers. For eight of the past eleven years, she has worked as a Neighborhood Coordinator, recruiting volunteers to implement Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program projects in Linden Hills (1995-2001) and Fulton (2004 to present) neighborhoods in Southwest Minneapolis. Rhea also volunteers her time for the Gilbert & Sullivan Very Light Opera Company, the Linden Hills History Study Group, and as a CCP/SAFE block leader.