Wednesdays will never be the same at the Resource Center. After 16 years, our beloved volunteer Mary Therese Shelble is retiring from her mail duties and focusing on her health.
Mary T’s compassion, kindness, and sense of humor will be dearly missed. We truly cannot fully express our sincere gratitude for her dedication to our work and our guests.
Way back in the day, when CCEH had barely begun, Mary T attended a talk at the Concord Public Library and learned about the issue of homelessness in our community. When the winter shelters at the churches opened that year, she volunteered for evening shifts (she was working full-time and couldn’t stay overnight). Then, in 2011, Mary Therese retired and began to volunteer at the Resource Center when it was housed in the South State Street location. Mary Therese helped with the coffee and snacks, the mail, cleaning bathrooms and floors. She took her volunteer responsibilities very seriously, and spent many evenings perfecting her coffee recipe to ensure Resource Center guests had delicious coffee!
Her memory from the Resource Center is of the people who needed help navigating their lives and getting the assistance they needed. She found that greeting a person by name makes them very happy, and feel seen. She is thrilled to see the Resource Center focus on getting people housed, and the work that case management staff have been doing to assist people beyond their immediate needs. She notes that she believes in showing kindness and respect towards all people, and she stayed as long as she did “because it gives me joy.”
We wish Mary Therese a heartfelt farewell and deep thanks for her years of dedicated service, and we wish her all the best in her next adventures!
