Franklin County Community Meals Program

If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.
-- Buzz Aldrin

Recorder, Tuesday, December 23, 2008

 By RICHIE DAVIS Recorder Staff

An ice storm that paralyzed much of Franklin County a week and a half ago sent Amy Clarke to the Orange Food Pantry on a mission.

The power had gone out overnight, and Clarke -- director of the Franklin County Community Meals Program -- hit the road with several coolers to rescue 120 pounds of frozen ground beef and ground turkey. As she drove back toward Greenfield, she used her cell phone to call neighbors and anyplace she could think of with room in their freezer before homing in on the Franklin Area Survival Center in Turners Falls.

It was hardly an odd chore for Clarke, who will be honored today as the 26th Recorder Citizen of the Year at a Franklin County Chamber of Commerce breakfast at Deerfield Academy.

When a gas odor at Greenfield's Church Street Home one bitterly cold night last winter required an emergency evacuation of its eight senior residents, Clarke -- the president of the home's executive board -- was on the scene in a matter of minutes to help them stay calm, got a mini-van on the scene to take them to the police station to warm up until she could round up overnight accommodations at the Greenfield Inn.

When voters flocked to Greenfield High School for last month's national election, they found 60 pies on sale to benefit the community meals program -- a project dreamed up and supervised by Clarke.
'She's all over the place,' said Madison Circle neighbor Archie Nahman, one of numerous friends, neighbors and relatives who nominated the 54-year-old Greenfield native for the annual award. 'She touches everybody's life in this town and this county.'

Another former neighbor, Mark Dyer, said, 'At no point does she ever stand in a pulpit. She just gets it done quietly, and extremely effectively.'

When she was growing up just down the street, Dyer, Nahman and other residents in the tight-knit neighborhood remember Amy Sawyer going door to door with friends pulling a little red wagon piled with handmade potholders, Barbie clothes and other handicrafts to raise money for what was then Franklin County Public Hospital.

She also produced benefit shows in the backyard of her family's Madison Circle home, as a fundraiser, recalled her younger sister, Martha Folsom of Littleton. Folsom credited their parents, Robert and Nancy Sawyer, for instilling a love for giving.

Although Clarke constantly steps forward to chair various campaigns, her sister said, 'Her real joy is doing hands-on work and seeing the joy in the faces of people she's helping.'

Conway resident Phyllis Jeswald, who serves on the Community Meals board, added that Clarke 'works not only behind the scenes, but also on the front lines, picking up, delivering and distributing food through the Orange Food Pantry.'

As a teenager, she would walk in her 'candy-striper's' volunteer uniform to the hospital after school and on weekends.

Clarke, who as a child thought she might want to be a doctor and even had a lab set up in the basement, chaired Baystate Franklin Medical Center's 2006-2007 Second Century Capital Campaign community division, helping raise nearly $100,000, and she is a member of the hospital's Community Benefits Committee and is a corporator of the hospital.

She is also a founding member of the Women's Way of the United Way of Franklin County, which has provided backpacks, sneakers, pajama bags and other items to needy children in the community.
Her long list of service also includes being a member of Stoneleigh-Burnham School head's transition team, a corporator of the United Way of Franklin County, a volunteer for the Greenfield Community YMCA's annual Sustaining Campaign for Youth, a member of Greenfield's Second Congregational Church Council and the church's Church and Education Committee, as well as a grant reviewer for the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts.

She's also been a Stoneleigh-Burnham trustee and a member of its head search committee, been a member of two pastoral search committees, served as secretary of the Greenfield Middle School Building Committee, chaired the board of Volunteers in Public Schools, volunteered at Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and for Federal Street School's Parent Teacher Organization, as well as been a member of Baystate Health Systems Performance Improvement Committee and its Community Health and Education Promotion Committee.

'It sounds much more impressive than it is when you just pile it together on a day-to-day basis,' says Clarke, who says she was 'stunned' when she was told she had been selected Citizen of the Year. The award comes with a $250 prize for her and $250 for the charity of her choice -- the Community Meals program.

Clarke has had the part-time meals job for six years, paid for 15 hours to coordinate the five weekly meals in Greenfield, Orange and Turners Falls and 12ﾽ hours to run the Orange Food Pantry with her neighbor, Lynn Page.

'How lucky I am to have that as my job, because if I was going to choose to do something as a volunteer, that's what I would choose to do,' said Clarke, who was a grant writer for the Greenfield schools for half a dozen years before that. 'It's great growing up in a town like this. It's like a storybook life around here, and that kind of grounds you.'

The horticulture graduate from the University of Massachusetts Stockbridge School sees herself as a 'community helper here and there person,' for whom volunteering provides 'the biggest piece of my sense of self. As the oldest of five children of the woman who was the United Way of Franklin County's first woman president and a man who donated much of his time to the county's public hospital, Clarke explains, 'It's just a given -- I can't imagine not.'

Yet those who have watched Clarke and worked with her are clearly impressed.
'It would be hard to imagine walking in her shoes for a week, never mind a lifetime,' said Dyer in his nomination. And at the end of a project, added fellow school volunteer Linda Smith of Greenfield, Clarke sends hand-written thank-you notes to everyone who helped in what Arthur Hannan of Greenfield called 'her signature thoughtful, persuasive and positive way.'

A less official list of Clarke's good works includes a memorial bench and garden on the Madison Circle field that she, her husband Douglas and neighbors helped to create for Heather Carbone Brassell following her death last year after a long bout with cancer, and the May baskets that their children used to leave for elderly residents in the neighborhood.

'When the children are away, she delivers them herself,' wrote Marcia Harris in her nomination letter.
Several nominators mentioned that Clarke's husband, who she first met while volunteering together at the hospital during high school, could well share the prize if it were awarded to a couple. An operations manager at Western Massachusetts Electric Co., Doug Clarke's own list of involvement includes Greenfield Kiwanis Club, Camp Kewanee and caring for Greenfield's town clock.

He, along with their daughter, Emily, was a Community Meals board member before his wife became involved with the organization, just as their other children volunteered for Big Brother-Big Sisters and taught Sunday School.

On an afternoon last week after returning home from five hours of serving 127 families at the food pantry, Amy Clarke likened Community Meals to 'sort of an expansion of growing up on Madison Circle, where somebody moves in and you bring them cake, or go visit. It's just so easy for everybody in the community to support. It's just such a basic need, regular people like us, and they're just on the verge of losing everything.'

Other Recorder citizens of the year have included Al Dray and Philip Gilmore of Deerfield; Pearl Care of Erving; Theodore Martineau of Montague City; Rolland Gifford, Marion Taylor and Marvin Shippee of Shelburne Falls; Marjorie Reid, Edward Tombs, Irmarie Jones, Jean Cummings, David McCarthy, Charles Carter and Arline Cohn of Greenfield, the Rev. Stanley Aksamit, John Carey and Richard Kimball of Turners Falls, Albert Diemand of Wendell, Frank R. 'Bud' Foster and William Shores of Bernardston and Marian Holbrook of Northfield, Allan Adie of Gill, Geneva Lawson of Orange, Adelia Bardwell of Whately.

Not surprisingly, Clarke and many of those fellow Recorder Citizens have rubbed elbows as they've rolled up their sleeves.

'Pearl Care was my nature teacher in fifth grade,' said Clarke, who expects her parents, her five children and three grandchildren to be on hand today. 'Charlie Carter was a great friend from our church who nominated me to the hospital committee. Marjorie Reid is probably the dearest person I know. Jean Cummings and I did United Way together and Arline Cohn and I did MSPCC together. It's such a great honor being on that list.'

You can reach Richie Davis at: rdavis@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 269

Franklin County Community Meal Program © 2007