News & events
What our neighbours are doing, what we are learning, and what is coming up that you can turn up to.
Number five hundred went into a bathroom on Manistique Street on a Saturday morning in August, fitted by a retired union carpenter named Danny Osei who also fitted number one, in Highland Park, in the spring of 2022.
Between those two bars are four years, forty-one volunteers, one very patient plumber from Warren who has never once said no to a phone call, and about $186,000 of donated money and materials.
Here is the part worth sitting with: in four years, across every bathroom we have fitted, not one participant has reported a fall in that room. Nationally, falls are the leading cause of injury death for adults over 65, and the bathroom is where a disproportionate share of them happen. A grab bar costs us about $34 installed.
We are not claiming a clinical trial. Our sample is small, self-reported, and full of people who are also getting weekly visits and better lighting and someone checking that the stair rail is tight. That is rather the point. Safety at home is not one intervention; it is a dozen small ones, done properly, by someone who came back.
The waiting list for a safety walkthrough currently runs about ten days in Wayne County and three weeks in Oakland. If you have ever hung a handrail, we would like to hear from you.
When the National Weather Service issued a heat advisory for Southeast Michigan on 19 July, we activated the storm protocol: every Warm Line caller doubled their round, and 62 volunteers drove cooling checks to 300 homes over four days.
They found 41 households without working air conditioning, 12 with fans they were not using because of the electricity bill, and 3 people who had not left the house since the previous Thursday. Eight were driven to cooling centres. Four were referred for emergency utility assistance the same afternoon.
The thing that surprised us most was who got missed by the official channels. Almost everyone we found in difficulty was already on somebody's list — a health system's, a utility's, a city's. They were on the list and nobody had knocked. Being counted is not the same as being visited.
Our winter storm protocol runs on the same model, and we will be recruiting for it from October. It is the single easiest way to start volunteering with us: one afternoon, a list of six addresses, and a knock.
Ms. Fadwa Chami's sophomore English class took Letters of Love as a term project. They studied the form, argued about tone, and then wrote — 1,100 letters over six weeks, in English, Arabic and, in one memorable case, both at once.
The students set their own rules, which turned out to be stricter than ours: no mentioning illness, no pity, no advice, and nothing that would make the reader feel like a school assignment.
We have been delivering them since May. A woman in Springwells asked her visitor to read hers aloud four times. A man in Warren wrote back, which is not something the programme is set up for, so we drove his reply to the school ourselves.
If you teach, run a congregation, lead a book club or manage a team that keeps asking for a volunteering day, this is the easiest possible starting point. We supply the paper, the guidance and the postage. You supply two hours and a room.
More from the block
Our waiting list there reached five weeks. Rather than keep taking names, we stopped, said so publicly, and put everything into recruitment. Meals, rides and calls continue as normal — and we will reopen visits the week we have the visitors to honour them.
Help us reopen itFourteen per cent of weekend meal bags were coming back unopened. Nobody had told us because nobody wants to seem ungrateful. Nine participants spent six Tuesdays rebuilding the menu with our kitchen. Refusals are now under four per cent.
About meals
A Southfield employer refurbished and donated thirty tablets with a year of data. Every one is now on permanent loan to a participant who had no device. Twenty-two of those thirty had never made a video call before.
About Tech TogetherUpcoming
Everything below is open to anyone. You do not need to be a volunteer, a donor, or sure about any of this yet.
Saturday, 9am–3pm · 1500 Woodward Ave, Detroit · Lunch provided, free
The full training day: safeguarding, boundaries, dementia awareness, confidentiality, and how to sit comfortably in a silence. Runs on the second Saturday of every month.
Saturday, 8am–2pm · Meet at Eliza Howell Park · All ages, no skills needed
One block, one morning. Yard clearing, gutter work, painting, handrails and a barbecue at the end. Bring gloves; we have everything else.
Friday, 6:30pm · The Eastern, Detroit · Tickets $125, tables from $1,000
Dinner, a short programme, and three participants telling their own stories in their own words. Last year's evening funded a full meal route for two years.
Saturday, 10am–1pm · Woodward Ave warehouse · Family friendly, ages 8+
Assemble 600 holiday pantry boxes in a morning. Our most popular group volunteering day of the year — book early.
Saturday, all day · Across all three counties
Coat and blanket distribution paired with a doorstep visit to every participant before the first hard freeze.
Thursday · Anywhere you are
Our biggest letter-writing push of the year. Classrooms, workplaces and congregations across the country write with us. Sign up and we will post you a kit.
Porch projects and pantry pack-outs can be booked privately for teams of 15 to 120. We will build a half-day that genuinely helps.
For interviews, photography permissions or data requests, contact our communications team. We ask that participants are never photographed or named without their own written consent — no exceptions, including for us.
The Porch Light
A story, the volunteer shifts we are short of, and the honest state of the waiting list. Nothing else, ever. Unsubscribe in one click.
