Volunteers help Goodfellows reach thousands of families each holiday season
Great projects attract great people. In fact, it is those folks who make the project great and keep it going for a long time.
Take, for example, the Goodfellow Fund, the Star-Telegram nonprofit that has been allowing big folks to help little folks (children) have happier Christmas holidays in Fort Worth since 1912.
The goal of the Goodfellow Fund is to provide $50 gift cards for shoes and clothing for 12,000 needy Tarrant County school children in the 2021 holiday season. It’s a project they couldn’t do without the many volunteers working together to make it possible.
“After retiring, I saw an advertisement for Goodfellows in the Star-Telegram. I was excited to have an opportunity to do volunteer work and thought I would try this,” recalled Brenda Smith. “I had heard about the program for years and was intrigued by the opportunity to offer my help.”
Smith volunteered for seven years and is now a member of the Goodfellows staff. She started volunteering one day a week, offering her computer skills, and before long she was showing up almost every day.
Nasema Marquis is in her second year as a Goodfellows volunteer. Her first was in 2018, before a prior commitment kept her away in 2019, followed by COVID in 2020.
Her husband, an avid reader of the Star-Telegram, delivered the paper when he was 10. It was there they realized a calling to join the cause, she said.
“We both felt a pull toward an organization with the goal of helping schoolchildren. They are society’s most vulnerable and least able, and more importantly, our future,” she said.
“Meeting families that want to give their children whatever they can speaks to my faith that there is hope and the desire to rise up above their current situation. Providing a gift card to a major store to a parent allows them choice without any hint of embarrassment or sense of hiding the handout.”
Why are volunteers so important to the success of Goodfellows? Smith noted the many thousands the program helps each year. Volunteers are needed for help in areas such as verifying documentation to support each application, along with scheduling and conducting applicant interviews.
Around 240 appointments are scheduled every day for the six weeks of the program. With a staff of only five people, volunteers are essential to meeting the needs of the program.
“We couldn’t do it without them,” Smith said simply.
Sally Holt is in her third year of volunteering, as is her husband Nathan. She said they keep coming back because they love interviewing the families and seeing their joy and happiness, along with the smiles and tears. With the gift cards they can buy their children coats and other clothing that, without this program they wouldn’t be able to do.
“I think what separates this program from other programs is that you actually get to meet the clients in person and see the happiness in their faces. Plus there is no waiting time to receive the gift cards. They get them immediately which is awesome,” she said.
Maria Jorge remembered how supportive the community was when her family migrated to the United States from Cuba many years ago. The memory of that assistance prompts her to do the same now as a volunteer in her fourth year with Goodfellows. In fact, like so many other volunteers, she has brought others into the fold as well.
“It is rewarding to be able to serve others,” she said humbly, adding, “Gifts go straight to clients.”
And though she is now a member of the staff, Smith said she still gets the same special feeling as when was a volunteer. After all, she’s still helping children.
“The overwhelming majority of our applicants are in dire need of help. It is so gratifying to see the tears in their eyes when we give them the cards,” Smith said.
She recalled one special time when Goodfellows helped a grandmother and the seven grandchildren she was raising.
“When I gave her the cards, she started crying and said, ‘My babies need new clothes for church. Thank you!’ I will never forget that,” Smith said.
About the Goodfellow Fund
The story on the Goodfellows website describes its beginning as an offshoot of the first newspaper charity drive in the United States, started by the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 10, 1909. A Chicago city attorney wrote a letter challenging his friends to donate the money they would have spent on holiday partying to charity.
A couple years later, the Advertising Club of Fort Worth staged the first local Goodfellows campaign. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1912, Publisher Amon G. Carter brought the tradition to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.