Meet Volunteer Joyce R.: “This is the best day of my week!”
Meet Joyce Reinke, a 15+-year volunteer extraordinaire with Bridging, an active life-long volunteer, a great-grandmother, and a trailblazer in the volunteer coordinator community.
She begins each week — on Monday mornings —as a volunteer at Bridging, shopping alongside clients as they select furniture and essential household goods and transition to housing stability.
“This is the best day of my week,” she says. “Being a shopper, it’s been just delightful because of the people, the guests we serve. We meet lovely, wonderful people. We help someone through an experience or challenge. When they leave Bridging, they have a home, furniture, and a place where their kids can invite friends.”
Joyce brings her sparkle and accepting presence to everyone she meets at Bridging, according to Erin Colburn, Bridging’s volunteer coordinator:
“Joyce is the calmest and kindest person that I have ever met. At times, challenges come up, but no matter what, at the end of the appointment, the clients are smiling and hugging her.”
Joyce is a tireless champion of Bridging. With her many years and hours of service, she has been dedicated to Bridging within the building and as our primary contact with her faith communities, Normandale United Methodist Church and currently, Oak Grove Presbyterian Church. She has led Super Bowl warm-the-bench blanket drives for Bridging, helped acquire important funding for our operations, and submitted countless Bridging articles in their newsletters.
An active volunteer in the community, Joyce recruited her husband Dick to volunteer at Bridging. The pair also delivers meals through Meals on Wheels, continuing Joyce’s decades-long volunteer commitment to the organization. On Fridays, Joyce and Dick deliver food bags for children at Valley View Elementary School who do not have access to a consistent food supply on weekends. Focused on building relationships, they listened to kids read books at Eagle Creek Elementary School for five years, and, until COVID-19 started, volunteered as weekly breakfast buddies for an elementary school-aged student.
Joyce shares incredible perspective and talents given her professional career as a volunteer coordinator dating back to the 1970’s. She worked as a coordinator for the Bloomington Meals on Wheels program, coordinating 500 volunteers and serving in that role for 10 years. She and her team were instrumental in building relationships with volunteers from large Twin Cities corporations, who would donate their time over the lunch hour to deliver meals. Joyce and her colleagues helped expand this new model to other organizations nationwide including Meals on Wheels in Hennepin and Anoka Counties where she was a volunteer coordinator in the 1980’s.
Later in her career as the Town Square manager with MN Masonic Home, Joyce provided an innovative and accessible community-focused experience for senior residents, relying on the coordination of volunteers for its operations.
“The ideas came from leadership. I’m an implementer. I help make things happen. It happens with a team of people – and most of the time – the people are volunteers,” she says. “I just love volunteers. What they do is incredible. The world would not be the same without them, would it?”
The Bridging team agrees! We are grateful for Joyce Reinke and the scores of dedicated volunteers at Bridging who play an essential role in our efforts to Furnish Homes with Hope.