Our supporters may recall that today is a special day for our organization. It is the day that the remarkable life of Mary Powell began. Well today, on Mary’s birthday, as we verified the service hours of another young volunteer, we made yet another serendipitous discovery, which seems to happen more than one might imagine.
One of our most recent candidates for the President’s Volunteer Service Award introduced us to DOROT; an organization founded in 1976 by a group of Columbia University School of Social Work (CSSW) graduates who started visiting and delivering food to their older neighbors on New York’s Upper West Side. Today, DOROT has grown substantially and their programs include food, companionship, education and cultural enrichment for elderly community members in need. Our‘discovery’ is that those founding CSSW alumni from forty-eight years ago undoubtedly knew Mary Powell rather personally. As the beloved manager of the school’s mailroom for forty years, she handled all of the student and faculty mail, and when they purchased their textbooks, they did it through ‘University Book Service’ founded by Mary Powell when the university’s satellite bookstore at the CSSW East Side location closed a number of years earlier. It is indeed a small world.
Please consider donating whatever you can afford to help mpfusa.org continue to fulfill and expand our mission and reach, which currently stands at eight U.S. states, with forty-five student scholarships, twenty-five volunteer service awards and forty-one music therapy sponsorships for U.S. veterans with PTSD. Thank you for your support; past, present and future.