Kathleen Merryman column: Furniture bank helps safe housing feel like home
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We think of getting needy kids and families into safe housing as a job well done.
The folks at NW Furniture Bank see it as a job almost done.
For the most part, those houses and apartments are bare.
LeAnn Brinkman and her four youngest children took what they could carry when they fled an abusive home.
They couldn't carry the beds, tables or chairs.
Brinkman did her best to cast sleeping, sitting and eating on the floor as an indoor camping adventure.
Her kids knew better.
Rocio Chavez visits her Community Health Care clients in bare apartments where six people share one bed and moms are delighted when they can harvest a chair from someone else's trash.
For people who stretch their money to cover rent, utilities, food, school supplies and clothes, a couch is a dream as distant as Oz.
Now it's as close as a 10,000-square-foot warehouse tucked between Interstate 5 and the Port of Tacoma.
NW Furniture Bank has, in just 18 months, grown into the place where mere housing becomes a comfortable home.
It's also an act of faith and remembrance.
Bill Lemke, who is a furniture sales representative, went with his son Brian to a church mission trip in San Francisco in June 2005. They were volunteering at a food bank when Brian told his dad he ought to do the same thing with furniture. The amount of usable scratch-and-dent furniture that hits the dump is shocking. The disposal fees are a drain on stores, so there are willing donors.
That fall, Brian was diagnosed with lymphoma. He died at 17 on Nov. 24, 2005.
In November 2007, Bill and Joelene Lemke opened NW Furniture Bank in space donated by friends at the Old Cannery Furniture Warehouse.
In the year and a half since I first wrote about it, the furniture bank has moved twice, to bigger warehouses. It has been given a delivery truck. It has agreements with 60 social services agencies who have referred nearly 600 families and foster kids for a chance to choose a household full of furniture for a processing fee of $50.
It's serving 55 to 60 families a month, compared to 15 at the beginning.
So far, it has given away about 8,000 sofas, chairs, beds, dressers and tables, worth about $500,000. That's enough to fill 64 railroad cars with good stuff that would otherwise have gone to landfills.
And that doesn't count the convoys of new furniture it collected from manufacturers and delivered to flood victims in Chehalis in 2008.
Bill Lemke likes to think of the furniture business as symbiotic.
Take the big Ikea circle. The Swedish mega-retailer needs a place to send overtstock goods from its stores and distribution center. Kids aging out of foster care need dressers. Seniors, schools and service organizations need a venue where up to 30 friends can get together and assemble unpronounceable bookshelves.
It's not just Ikea, said furniture bank operations manager Matt van den Heuvel. Emerald Home Furnishings, Sleep Country USA, Harkness Furniture, Selden's Home Furnishings, The Old Cannery, Ideal Home Furnishings and Mor Furniture For Less are regular donors.
The more the merrier, van den Heuvel said. He'll come and pick up.
He'll do the same for ordinary people. They need only call him at 253-341-7553, or e-mail him at matt@nwfurniturebank.org.
By the way, van den Heuvel is a sucker for pictures, books, new linens and alarm clocks.
"We want to turn an empty space into a home," he said.
He's also set up a kid's corner, where clients' children can play and choose something of their own while their parents shop.
Bill Lemke's always on the prowl for kitchen goods. He dreams of a citywide Bring Out Your Pots and Pans Day, maybe with a bed race fundraiser on the Eleventh Street Bridge someday.
At the speed things are going, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a box of saucepans, and maybe a few new pillows, ready to go.
We think of getting needy kids and families into safe housing as a job well done.
The folks at NW Furniture Bank see it as a job almost done.
For the most part, those houses and apartments are bare.
LeAnn Brinkman and her four youngest children took what they could carry when they fled an abusive home.
They couldn't carry the beds, tables or chairs.
Brinkman did her best to cast sleeping, sitting and eating on the floor as an indoor camping adventure.
Her kids knew better.
Rocio Chavez visits her Community Health Care clients in bare apartments where six people share one bed and moms are delighted when they can harvest a chair from someone else's trash.
For people who stretch their money to cover rent, utilities, food, school supplies and clothes, a couch is a dream as distant as Oz.
Now it's as close as a 10,000-square-foot warehouse tucked between Interstate 5 and the Port of Tacoma.
NW Furniture Bank has, in just 18 months, grown into the place where mere housing becomes a comfortable home.
It's also an act of faith and remembrance.
Bill Lemke, who is a furniture sales representative, went with his son Brian to a church mission trip in San Francisco in June 2005. They were volunteering at a food bank when Brian told his dad he ought to do the same thing with furniture. The amount of usable scratch-and-dent furniture that hits the dump is shocking. The disposal fees are a drain on stores, so there are willing donors.
That fall, Brian was diagnosed with lymphoma. He died at 17 on Nov. 24, 2005.
In November 2007, Bill and Joelene Lemke opened NW Furniture Bank in space donated by friends at the Old Cannery Furniture Warehouse.
In the year and a half since I first wrote about it, the furniture bank has moved twice, to bigger warehouses. It has been given a delivery truck. It has agreements with 60 social services agencies who have referred nearly 600 families and foster kids for a chance to choose a household full of furniture for a processing fee of $50.
It's serving 55 to 60 families a month, compared to 15 at the beginning.
So far, it has given away about 8,000 sofas, chairs, beds, dressers and tables, worth about $500,000. That's enough to fill 64 railroad cars with good stuff that would otherwise have gone to landfills.
And that doesn't count the convoys of new furniture it collected from manufacturers and delivered to flood victims in Chehalis in 2008.
Bill Lemke likes to think of the furniture business as symbiotic.
Take the big Ikea circle. The Swedish mega-retailer needs a place to send overtstock goods from its stores and distribution center. Kids aging out of foster care need dressers. Seniors, schools and service organizations need a venue where up to 30 friends can get together and assemble unpronounceable bookshelves.
It's not just Ikea, said furniture bank operations manager Matt van den Heuvel. Emerald Home Furnishings, Sleep Country USA, Harkness Furniture, Selden's Home Furnishings, The Old Cannery, Ideal Home Furnishings and Mor Furniture For Less are regular donors.
The more the merrier, van den Heuvel said. He'll come and pick up.
He'll do the same for ordinary people. They need only call him at 253-341-7553, or e-mail him at matt@nwfurniturebank.org.
By the way, van den Heuvel is a sucker for pictures, books, new linens and alarm clocks.
"We want to turn an empty space into a home," he said.
He's also set up a kid's corner, where clients' children can play and choose something of their own while their parents shop.
Bill Lemke's always on the prowl for kitchen goods. He dreams of a citywide Bring Out Your Pots and Pans Day, maybe with a bed race fundraiser on the Eleventh Street Bridge someday.
At the speed things are going, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a box of saucepans, and maybe a few new pillows, ready to go.
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