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FeedThreads of Hope
With our busy lives, our homes, and our families, many of us believe we don’t have the time or energy to volunteer for a good cause. But guess what? The five recipients of Diablo’s 2007 Threads of Hope Awards set a stunning example of how it’s done, as they make major accomplishments in the name of community service.
With our busy lives, our homes, and our families, many of us believe we don’t have the time or energy to volunteer for a good cause. But guess what? The five recipients of Diablo’s 2007 Threads of Hope Awards set a stunning example of how it’s done, as they make major accomplishments in the name of community service.
Mary Ann Hannon
Sunol-Ohlone Regional Wilderness
Mary Ann Hannon was a stay-at-home mom who liked teaching kids about nature. Scott Hein realized he could use his outdoor photography to help with land conservation. Carl Hopkins wanted to continue to promote social justice after retiring as a juvenile probation officer. Liz Lamach noticed a desperate need for a playground for children like her disabled eight-year-old son. And 83-year-old Daphne Miller saw no reason to sit idle when the East Bay has its share of people who can’t survive without home-delivered meals and groceries.
Mary Ann Hannon has spent more years volunteering for the Sunol-Ohlone Regional Wilderness—35 plus—than most people devote to a career. That’s some serious staying power. Ever modest, Hannon attributes her commitment to simply having had more time than others. “I was a stay-at-home mom,” she says. “I would sometimes even go to meetings and programs with one of my kids on my back.”
The wilderness, south of Pleasanton, covers some of the most secluded land in the East Bay Regional Park District. In her more than 2,000 volunteer hours, Hannon has led countless wildflower walks and special events, and worked with other volunteers to create an inventory of the park’s plants, which has resulted in the development of a spectacular herbarium at the wilderness.
“I’m sort of a self-educated plant person,” says Hannon, who has taken a taxonomy class at Las Positas College almost every spring for 20 years. “So I go out on botanizing trips and collect plants, mount them, and put them in the herbarium for people to enjoy and learn about.”
Aside from her passion for plants, Hannon has always been keen about sharing her knowledge of the park’s natural and cultural history with schoolchildren. Whether helping them appreciate a pinecone without taking it home or spending hours cutting tules for a Native American display, she volunteers mostly because she wants to pass on her love of the outdoors.
“If I can give children a better appreciation for the environment or make them aware of how special the world is, and have them take care of it as they grow up and become conscious of energy usage and picking up trash—it will have been worthwhile,” she says.
Her volunteer legacy doesn‘t stop there. Hannon has also served on an East Bay Regional Park District committee that organizes docent training at parks with a visitor center. “That took at least a whole year of going to meetings at the district level with staff, administrators, and volunteers from other programs,” she says. “But it’s something I’m really proud of.”
At 66, Hannon—now a grandmother of three—still donates at least two hours a week to the district. “I might take a break from the regular schedule of programs and monitor bluebird boxes or something,” says Hannon, “but I won’t ever leave completely.”
Scott Hein
Save Mount Diablo
Whenever Save Mount Diablo begins the process of acquiring a piece of land, it sends Scott Hein to photograph the property, so the organization can have beautiful photos to convince people the land should be saved.
“There are two candidates to be called the Ansel Adams of Mount Diablo, and Scott is one,” says Seth Adams, director of land programs for Save Mount Diablo, also referring to Stephen Joseph. “Scott’s photographs are amazing.”
Photographer is just one of the many hats Hein, 47, has worn for Save Mount Diablo since he began volunteering in 2001. A chemist who owns a company that specializes in chemical measurements, Hein serves on Save Mount Diablo’s board of directors and as chairman for the land committee.
He also leads hikes to introduce the community to properties the organization is working to preserve and has designed websites for the organization’s political campaigns. Most recently, he was one of the many volunteers who helped to produce a map that covers 520 miles of public trails, stretching from Walnut Creek to Los Vaqueros watershed past Brentwood.
“He’s a scientist and brings that attention to detail to everything he does,” says Adams. “On top of that, he’s an artist and a tremendous naturalist. He can do anything.”Not that he does it all alone. Hein’s wife, Claudia, a chemistry instructor at Diablo Valley College, got him involved in volunteering with Save Mount Diablo; she is also a member of the organization’s board of directors.
The Heins are such devoted naturalists that when they got married in 1988, they asked friends to make donations to the Nature Conservancy in lieu of wedding gifts. As Adams says, “Chances are if Scott was taking a photo, Claudia was standing next to him.”
The couple’s love for the environment is most evident when they’re out in nature together. They walk through Mitchell Canyon, near their Concord home, with their eyes actively flitting from side to side, cataloging plants, animals, and especially birds.
The sight of a tiny horned lizard, a fairly rare species for this area, makes Scott as giddy as a kid. Claudia throws caution aside and wades into a stand of poison oak to pick up a crumpled beer can. And Scott always has his camera ready to snap a photo of something extraordinary.
“For me, it really is about communicating how special the place we live in is,” he says. “There are so many special places on Mount Diablo and the surrounding parks.”
Liz Lamach
Matteo’s Dream Playground
The first thing kids notice at Matteo’s Dream Playground in Concord is the towering tree house. On a typical playground, kids would climb stairs or ladders to reach it. Disabled kids who use wheelchairs would have to sit on the sidelines and watch as their able-bodied peers had all the fun.
But Matteo’s Dream is not a typical playground. Liz Lamach, the mother of Matteo, an eight-year-old boy who is blind and uses a wheelchair, came up with the idea of creating a play space for kids of all abilities—those who can walk, see, and hear, and those who can’t. At this playground, which opened in May, kids like Matteo can roll their wheelchairs up wide, curving ramps to reach the tree house. From there, they can get a bird’s-eye view of surrounding Hillcrest Park and the rest of the 12,000-square-foot play structure, which also includes a chairlift and a huge boat in which they can sit in their wheelchairs and rock from side to side.
“Most of us take the play equipment at our local parks for granted,” notes Lamach, 44, a Concord native. She says that some of her best childhood memories were of days spent at city parks. She especially loved the twisty slide at Baldwin Park, where she would play from dawn until dusk.
Lamach and her partner, Rene Henderson, adopted Matteo as an infant. Because he had special needs, they didn’t know whether he would ever experience the joy of playing in a park.
“While some playgrounds allow disabled children to maneuver their wheelchair down to the edge of playgrounds, they can’t get to the equipment without help or even go onto sand without [their wheels] getting stuck,” Lamach says. “When we used to take Matteo to the park, he could never play with his cousins. He couldn’t see what he was missing, but he could hear the other children having fun.”
When Matteo was one year old, the family took a trip to Los Angeles, where they visited Shane’s Inspiration in Griffith Park, the first universally accessible playground in the western United States.
“It’s a beautiful playground with wheelchair-accessible ramps and a number of features that allow disabled children to play alongside other children,” Lamach says. But as much as she liked many of the park’s features, she saw things that could be improved upon.
She wished that the play structure had wider ramps and a wheelchair-friendly rubber ground covering instead of sand and bark—so she incorporated these ideas and others into a proposal for Concord to build the first playground of its kind in the Bay Area.
The city embraced her idea and donated Hillcrest Park on Olivera Road and $232,000 in park funds. As a member of the city’s Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Commission, Lamach brought together more than 3,300 volunteers, including those from various Lions Club chapters in Contra Costa and Alameda counties to raise more than $750,000 and help with construction.
Matteo’s Dream serves as a blueprint for how a park can be constructed for all children. Designed by Dennis Wille of Leathers and Associates of New York, the park also features giant musical instruments and stainless steel slides that don’t generate static electricity, which can damage deaf children’s cochlear implants.
Matteo’s Dream has surpassed even Lamach’s wildest expectations. She and her family frequently visit, and Matteo loves riding the specially designed bucket swings in the rocking boat and playing the xylophones, pipe drums, and chimes. Although he can’t speak, Lamach says Matteo waves his arms wildly and breaks into a contagious smile whenever he hears music. Today, his park brings smiles to the faces of many Bay Area children.
“One little boy told me that visiting Matteo’s Dream was like visiting Disneyland,” Lamach says. “He was in a wheelchair and said this park finally gave him a place where he could play just like his friends.”
Carl Hopkins
Center for Human Development
Ancient cultures had wise men, not lawyers, to help people settle their disputes. The East Bay has Carl Hopkins.
Hopkins, 74, is a volunteer mediator for the Pleasant Hill–based Center for Human Development’s Conflict Resolution Programs. He brings together warring factions and family members to work out disagreements that can be merely irritating or truly heart wrenching.
One week, he listened to a family complain about loud music being played by a neighbor’s teenage son. Another time, he guided adult siblings into deciding how one sister should handle their 90-year-old mother’s finances. And in another session, he helped a drug-addicted young woman realize that she’s not ready for her parents to relinquish guardianship of her two young children.
“One of the important things is that the resolution comes from them; they’re more likely to adhere to it when it’s not imposed on them by somebody else,” says the soft-spoken Hopkins, a retired juvenile probation officer.
In our litigious society, mediation offers an alternative to expensive, time-consuming, and adversarial court battles by showing people that they don’t need judges or other authorities to tell them how to get along.
For Hopkins, being a mediator gives him a chance to act on a long-standing belief in forms of justice that promote reconciliation and healing. He grew up in a loving family with four children in Houston in the 1930s and 1940s, but encountered daily slights as a young black man in the segregated South. During a stint in the army in the 1950s, he fine-tuned his compassion for people under stress by screening out soldiers facing disciplinary action who were actually mentally ill. When his race barred him from job opportunities in Texas, he came to the Bay Area and worked for Contra Costa’s Probation Department. He married and had two children.
Hopkins retired in 1992 and started mediating. Since then, he has emerged as one of the center’s most active volunteers, handling three or four mediations a month. “He listens with his heart, and his words come from his deep understanding of the nature of people in conflict,” says program director Barbara Proctor.
People end up in mediation voluntarily or by court order. The sessions usually last around three hours. Since people’s emotions often run high, Hopkins’s first job is to put people at ease. “We congratulate them for coming. We remind them that this isn’t a court hearing. We’re not judges. We’re not going to determine who’s right or wrong or guilty or innocent.”
Hopkins listens as each side airs its grievances. People often are defensive and as “upset with themselves as the situations they are in,” he says. He then asks questions that encourage participants to stop demonizing the other side. Most of the time, this process of listening and reflection leads people to important breakthroughs. People often lose their anger after they have voiced their complaints and feel that they have been listened to.
“Most of the ill feelings are worked out by the process, and people can talk in a manner that is productive,” he says. “It’s quite rewarding to be involved in this kind of thing.”
Daphne Miller
Food Bank of Contra Costa
Richmond’s 23rd Street is a main thoroughfare running through some of the poor, violent neighborhoods that made Richmond the third most dangerous city in California in 2006. The street is riddled with potholes and lined with rundown storefronts. Its most familiar landmark is Richmond High, better known for dropouts and gangbangers than academic achievement.
Down this street drives a tiny, 83-year-old great-grandmother in flip-flops. She is from Pleasant Hill, a safer, more affluent suburb on the other side of the East Bay hills. Her name is Daphne Miller, and she’s a Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano volunteer who delivers food to AIDS patients in Richmond.
"[Miller is] filling a position we wouldn’t be able to with our staff,” says Leslie Tolman, the Food Bank’s community distribution coordinator. “She never complains, and she’s always got a smile. She’s really a great example to all of us of being of service to the community.”
Miller makes her deliveries two Fridays a month, rain or shine. The houses she visits are, for the most part, small buildings, some with scraggly, weed-strewn lawns, and the people who live in them are too poor and too sick to shop for themselves.
“She’s a wonderful woman,” says Bill, a gaunt middle-aged man afflicted with AIDS and neuropathy, who is a regular recipient on Miller’s route. “I wouldn’t be able to [get food] unless it was for people like Daphne. It would be too much for me.”
Tolman estimates that Miller delivers about 15,000 pounds of food a year for the Food Bank—and that is just one of her many humanitarian endeavors.
She is involved in helping the less fortunate nearly every day of the week: Monday, she works the breadline at St. Anthony’s Church in San Francisco; Tuesday, she drives cancer patients to their appointments; Wednesday, she delivers food for Meals on Wheels. On the weekends, she gets paid to work at Concord House, a home for people with developmental disabilities. Ask her how she has the energy to do all that volunteering, and she just laughs.
“A lot of times, people look and say, ‘What can I do?’ ” says Miller, a retired school bus driver. “Well, if you look, there are lots of things to do every day. How can you sit at home? If you’re able, I think one should help those who need help.”
With that, she starts the engine of her car and off she goes, ready to make another delivery.
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