Tucked between the stories about the Boeing 7E7 and legislative updates, bits of good news about community giving and sacrifice have been popping up.
The Community Access Clinic is receiving generous donations from local businesspeople and organizations. Paul Allen’s foundation is giving the Snohomish County Children’s Museum a large grant, and the director of the local Red Cross is taking a self-imposed pay cut of 30 percent to balance the longstanding chapter’s budget.
What all this giving and sacrifice should be telling the rest of us is that our neighbors are in need.
We need a community clinic because there are many people in Snohomish County without medical insurance who wind up in our emergency rooms because local doctors can’t afford to take new Medicaid patients. We need a strong, healthy Red Cross in this county to help those impacted by disaster. We need educational outlets for our young children through organizations such as the children’s museum. And we need so much more.
Even in economic slumps many of us tend to remember to give — and give generously — when Thanksgiving and Christmas roll around. We clean out our cupboards and buy extra boxes of stuffing and cans of pumpkin pie filling at the market. Families adopt other families and pick out toys on wish lists so the children have something to unwrap during the holidays.
The rest of the year tends to slip away from many of us, though. As shelters often remind the community, hungry people are hungry year-round. Children whose main daily meal is served on a plastic tray in a school cafeteria may go without this summer.
Non-profit agencies throughout the country are reporting a slump in donations. The Snohomish County Red Cross has suffered a 47 percent drop in donations the past three years. Some of the people who used to give are now the ones in need. The rest of us need a reminder that if those of us who can chip in would do so, we’d meet the needs in our communities.
We are fortunate to have organizations and people such as the Everett Lions Club and Dwayne and Rosemary Lane who gave $150,000 and $100,000, respectively, to the community clinic scheduled to open in north Everett as early as January.
The average family can’t give nearly that much, but it can give something on a regular basis. The start of summer is the perfect time for people to examine their budgets and research which charities and organizations they’d like to be part of year-round.
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