ShareNet provided more than 165 new, well stocked backpacks to struggling families in our community at our Back to School Supplies event held on Aug. 30. It was about 45 more than last year. Leftover supplies were distributed evenly between the four Kingston-area schools.

A lot of hard work goes into planning for this, but volunteers who staff the event report it’s all worth it when they see the excited kids in line, and the look on their faces when they receive the backpack and look inside. Even if they’re dreading the end of summer and the first day of school, they enjoy the new backpack and supplies.

We couldn’t do this event alone and although we don’t have enough space to mention everyone who lent a hand, we must name a few key people in either staffing or funding the event: Columbia Bank, Shannon Harry, GTS Drywall, John and Rachel Johnson, Suzanne Tapper, Kitsap Credit Union, Linda Hell, and Greater Kingston Kiwanis.

Protecting privacy

Many readers who have enjoyed our volunteer profiles have asked why we don’t write similar articles about food bank clients or recipients of our other services. The simple answer is it’s mostly a matter of respecting and preserving the privacy of clients in a vulnerable situation, namely the inability to afford groceries, or pay their electric bill or rent. The fact is most of our clients do not want their situations, their hard times, made public.

It’s easy to imagine if you’re dealing with an issue as heavy as the possible loss of your home or the inability to feed your family that about the last thing you’d want is having your story published in the newspaper. Privately, our clients share their stories with us, of how they got here, and even find some comfort in sharing, but most of them don’t want it going any further than that.

On the other hand, agencies like ours use these individual stories to tell the story of their agency, to let the community and potential donors know why the work they do is so necessary and important. Individual stories mean something to us, and the details are exactly what move us, cause us to reflect on similar experiences we may have had, on the universal experience that sooner or later hard times touch us all.

But confidentiality is an important “best practice” of social service agencies, and unless a client gives us express permission to share their story, we cannot. There are some in our agency who don’t even believe in asking, who believe that even the question increases the client’s vulnerability. That said, sometimes all the individual stories shape into trends or patterns, and become a few key narrative threads.

The following is one of those patterns we’ve seen repeated more than once, of a family who recently made a significant donation to ShareNet’s weekend food program for school children.

Former clients giving back

Bill and Joanne, as we’ll call them, had lived a comfortable, relatively affluent existence. Bill left a 21-year career to try something new which ultimately did not work out. It took a while to recover professionally from the experience. Joanne went back to work for the first time since their children were born. They lost the comfortable life they were used to and, like many people find themselves doing these days, had to change their whole existence in order to get by. They sold their home and lived on a very tight budget for 20 months without Bill’s paycheck.

At this point they moved, and Kingston welcomed them. They were able to get back on their feet and one of their first acts once they had recovered was to look around to see who needed help in their community, who was doing the kind of work that addressed some of the losses they’d felt in recent years. This led them to ShareNet.

When we hear a story like this, of a donation made for those reasons, or a volunteer coming to work at ShareNet because they had received our services when they were struggling and wanted to give back now that they were in a better place, it’s gratifying.

It makes us feel the full circle of how and why ShareNet works: everyone’s vulnerability to their life changing instantly, to needing the services ShareNet provides, and everyone‘s ability to help in some capacity.