When you help one person, you help everyone

 

Lauren at the Mayfield Memorial 

 By Pat Kondas

After a career in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry, Lauren Mikulski shared she needed a change of pace and a chance to recharge. She signed up with the American Red Cross in November, and responded to a few local home fire responses as a Disaster Action Team member. In her heart, she knew she wanted to deploy to national disasters. On a Monday in December, she took the training to drive the Emergency Response Vehicle, and by that Thursday she was called to deploy to the Kentucky tornadoes.

Though it came about quickly, Lauren had no qualms about serving during the holidays. She says, “My first thought was 'what are the victims of the tornado going to go through on Christmas day?' There's no way I could sit at home and enjoy Christmas while thinking about that...thinking I could have been down here helping. It became a very easy decision.”

When she first arrived in Western Kentucky, the need for additional feeding volunteers had decreased, so she moved over to the Distribution of Emergency Supplies team, tasked with loading the Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles with emergency supplies and providing Emergency Aid Stations with relief items for community members. And because many people had transportation barriers, they went door to door seeing how they could help, “like a mobile emergency aid station.” She then moved back to the Feeding team, providing hot meals to residents in Mayfield. 

“It was really impactful, really rewarding, to be able to help people immediately – to be able to have that direct contact with the community members, to be able to make their day just a little bit easier.”

About her fellow Red Cross volunteers, Lauren observed “they're all here for the right reasons. They just want to help. They want to be put to good use. We don't care really what we do, we just want to make sure our time is being used so that we can help people. So we're willing to pitch in wherever we need to. Everyone pitches in. It's a really great culture at the Red Cross.”

Lauren's philosophy is clear. “I really believe when you help one person, you help everyone. You can't help everyone, but the fact that you do a good deed and then someone else does one – it's a chain reaction. When you help someone, you help everyone,” she explained. “This is a time for me to recharge. I don't feel burnt out from this work. I actually feel recharged by it.”

The Red Cross thanks you, Lauren, for keeping the chain reaction going and helping us all to recharge. You can join the Red Cross as a volunteer at redcross.org/volunteer.