Every Helping Hand Matters: Celebrating One Year of CHOICE Jobs at Bridging
At Bridging, we see it every day: it takes a community to furnish a home.
Thousands of volunteers give their time each year, helping sort donations, move furniture, prepare household essentials, and keep our warehouses ready for the families and individuals who walk through our doors. Every helping hand matters.
For the past year, the CHOICE Jobs team has been one of those groups.
For CHOICE Jobs leader Timothy, the partnership started with finding the right opportunity for his group. CHOICE provides personalized support and meaningful employment and community experiences for adults with intellectual disabilities. The team was looking for something different from their other work experiences. And they found it!
Every Friday, participants from CHOICE Jobs come to our Plymouth warehouse ready to work. They help unload and sort donations, organize furniture, and take on whatever jobs need to be done that day. The three most consistent folks are Sammy, Deisy, and Jacob.
After a year of coming every week, they know the warehouse pretty well.
Sammy likes staying busy, and he especially enjoys using the pallet jack and helping unload donations. You never quite know what you’ll find when you’re moving donated furniture. Just recently, Sammy was helping move a couch when a bunch of change fell out!
Deisy enjoys the physical work, especially lifting furniture and helping keep the warehouse clean. She also likes meeting new people. If new volunteers join the team on Fridays, she enjoys getting to “show them the ropes.”
Jacob also likes moving furniture and using the pallet jack. He’s gotten especially good at checking and rolling rugs, and he mentioned that he’s seen some interesting things come through on donation trucks.
He also likes to work out, so volunteering at Bridging gives him a chance to put those hard-earned muscles to use.
Timothy explained that finding a place where his group could do meaningful, hands-on work was important.
“We do a lot of stuff with employment,” Timothy said. “A couple of our folks work at Circle K. We do some office cleaning. But we didn’t really have an opportunity to just move stuff in a warehouse.”
After visiting Bridging, the group thought it would be a good fit. One year later, it’s clear that it was.
Timothy said he appreciates that the Bridging team has made CHOICE Jobs feel welcome.
“Bridging has been super supportive of our folks,” he said. “It’s always good having partners that genuinely want to interact with our folks and not just, ‘All right, you’re here, go do your task.’ Instead, it feels very much like a welcoming community.”
“We wanted to make sure the CHOICE Jobs team knew how much we appreciate them. When they reached their one-year anniversary at Bridging a couple weeks ago, we surprised them with treats to say, ‘Thank you!’,” said Yunyue Liu, Plymouth Volunteer Coordinator.
Timothy said that was one of the moments that stood out to him.
“I thought that was just very thoughtful and not something that we get from a lot of our volunteer partners,” he said.
He also notices how the group feels when they return from Bridging each week.
“They’re always in great moods,” he said. “So, I know that it means a lot to them.”
It means a lot to us, too!
The work CHOICE Jobs does every Friday is one small part of everything that happens at Bridging each week. But those small parts add up.
Every piece of furniture that gets moved, every donation that gets unloaded, and every rug that gets checked helps us get quality items onto our shelves and into the homes of people working toward housing stability.
And there are a lot of helping hands behind that work.
We’re grateful for every volunteer who gives their time to Bridging and has become part of our routine week after week.
Thank you, CHOICE Jobs, for one year of helping hands, hard work, and good energy at our Plymouth warehouse. We’re so glad you’re part of the Bridging community!
Your work helps us do what we do every day: provide quality furniture and household goods to people as they build stable homes and move forward with hope.
Are you interested in jumping in to help? Check out our volunteer opportunities here!
