Volunteer Stories

ARTICLE 6: Volunteer Stories

The People Building Freedom Houses: Portraits of Community in Action

Ask a volunteer why they do it.

They will surprise you.

They will not say it is because they had spare time or because it looks good on a resume. They will say something quiet and true: “Because someone did it for me.” Or: “Because I needed it as much as they did.” Or simply: “Because this is what I was made for, and I just didn’t know it until now.”

These are the people building Freedom Houses around the world through ILoveCommunity.org — the platform gifted to the community by Sovereign Empire and Peace Maker Society, the Manitoba-based freedom education organization that Marcel Bessette has led for 17 years. This is their work: planting Freedom Houses in local areas across the globe to heal, restore, and make every neighborhood healthy and safe again. And it is the volunteers — ordinary, extraordinary, irreplaceable — who are doing it.

Rosa: From Recipient to Builder.

Rosa came to her local Freedom House at one of the hardest moments of her life. A divorce, a job loss, and a move to a city where she knew no one had left her in a quiet freefall that people rarely admit to. She found the Freedom House through ILoveCommunityCard.org, looking for nothing in particular — just some sign that there were people who gave a damn.

She found that. She found more.

Within six months, Rosa had rebuilt her footing. Within a year, she was volunteering. She organizes the community welcome program now — the program that reaches out to new members before they have to ask, before they reach the point she once reached, and says: you are not invisible here.

“I know what it feels like to walk into a room and not know if you belong,” Rosa says. “So I make sure nobody else has to feel that for longer than about thirty seconds.”

James: The Trades That Became a Gift.

James spent 22 years in the trades. Electrician by profession, fixer of everything by habit. For most of his career, his skills were entirely transactional — deployed for people who paid for them, then taken home.

Then his daughter mentioned, at dinner, that a family in her community had been living without working heat for two months because they could not afford the repair.

James fixed it the following Saturday. He did not charge anything.

He has not stopped since. He registered on ILoveCommunityCard.org and listed his skills. He marked himself available for Freedom House community service work two Saturdays a month. In the past year he has helped fourteen families with repairs that would otherwise have been unaffordable emergencies — and he has recruited six other tradespeople from his network to join him.

“I had all of this,” he says, looking at his hands. “And for twenty years I thought it was only worth something if someone paid for it. I was wrong.”

Sandra: The Welcome That Changed Her.

Sandra was born in the city she still lives in. Her parents were born there too. She had never had to navigate being new anywhere — and for most of her life, she had been quietly invisible to the people who were.

She started volunteering with the newcomer welcome program at her local Freedom House after noticing that her next-door neighbors — a family who had arrived from overseas — spent their first winter barely leaving the house. She introduced herself. She brought food. She offered to walk them to the library.

That was three years ago. Today Sandra coordinates a welcome team that has helped over fifty newcomer families get oriented in their first sixty days. She has learned words in five languages. She has been invited to more dinners than she can count.

“They gave me more than I gave them,” she says, and she means it. “I understand my own city now in a way I never did before. I understand people. I thought I was going to help them belong here. But they helped me belong here too.”

You are the next story.                    

Every volunteer in the ILoveCommunity.org Freedom House network started where you are right now: reading a story that felt like it could be theirs, and wondering whether they had something to offer.

You do. You have always had something to offer. The Freedom House is waiting for exactly what you bring — your skills, your hours, your experience, your presence, your willingness to show up.

Visit ILoveCommunity.org to find the Freedom House nearest you and discover how to get involved. Register at ILoveCommunityCard.org and become a visible, findable part of the network that is healing communities around the world.

The story is being written right now, in Freedom Houses in neighborhoods on every continent. There is a chapter in it that belongs to you.

Come and write it.

ILoveCommunity.org & ILoveCommunityCard.org — Freedom Houses for every local area, on a global scale.A gift from Sovereign Empire & Peace Maker Society.