Pam Washek rallies a nonprofit Neighbor Brigade

In Massachusetts, families in need can turn to Neighbor Brigade, a nonprofit group founded by Pam Washek that's built community by community and run by neighbors themselves.

|
Courtesy of Anna Mellones
After neighbors helped care for her family while she was ill, Pam Washek founded the Neighbor Brigade, which offers free help – from preparing meals to running errands – to families with an illness or other crisis. 'Often recipients [of help] become volunteers,' she says. She hopes to expand Neighbor Brigade beyond Massachusetts.

It was something Pam Washek says she’d never experienced before.

When Ms. Washek was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, she was thrust into a cycle of daily radiation treatments. Cooking meals and getting her three daughters where they needed to go were suddenly much tougher tasks. But Washek says neighbors and friends immediately stepped forward and took care of meals every day for her children and organized rides to get them where they needed to go.

“It was really heartening and comforting,” says Washek, a resident of Wayland, Mass., a Boston suburb. “It almost made me feel I wasn't alone in this journey.”

RELATED: Kate Middleton lends a hand to children, the arts with her charity projects

Her friend, Jean Seidon, was also going through cancer treatment and experiencing a similar outpouring of support. Together Washek and Ms. Seidon were inspired to create the Wayland Angel Food Network, an organization helping families who had suddenly been thrown into a crisis and needed help with everyday tasks.

Washek says the organization had 35 members when it first began, mostly people who had helped her family.

As services expanded beyond cooking, the name was changed to Wayland Angels. Then, when Seidon died in 2006 and the organization had spread to other communities, Washek decided to rename it Neighbor Brigade. She currently serves as the organization’s executive director.

Through the nonprofit Neighbor Brigade, volunteers members in each community chapter make meals, give rides, run errands, and occasionally  do light household tasks like folding laundry or shoveling a driveway for families in crisis. The help is completely free of charge with no strings attached.

“We have many grateful recipients,” Washek says of the organization, which currently has 24 active chapters, all in Massachusetts, and 2,952 volunteers. “Often, recipients will become volunteers. It's their way of paying it forward.”

She said Neighbor Brigade is even more vital today when people may not know their next-door neighbors.

“People aren't as connected to neighbors as they were,” Washek says. “You're kind of on your own when you're hit with a crisis.”

Washek works to recruit leaders for new chapters and build relationships with hospitals, care centers, and other facilities in  Massachusetts communities, so that doctors and staff members may recommend Neighbor Brigade to their patients. The organization has started receiving calls from patients at large hospitals like Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, she says. Neighbor Brigade plans to expand beyond Massachusetts this year, she adds.

Neighbor Brigade is unique because it provides other members of your community to help you, Washek says.

“I think that's different from some companies that provide these services, because it's a neighbor” who's doing the helping, she says. “It's like extended family.”

• Sign up to receive a weekly selection of practical and inspiring Change Agent articles by clicking here.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Pam Washek rallies a nonprofit Neighbor Brigade
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2012/0319/Pam-Washek-rallies-a-nonprofit-Neighbor-Brigade
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe