Rewards of service plentiful

When she was 10, Inez Russell learned a lesson from her grandmother about service: "You just help people who need help."

Simple as that.

Through the years, Inez became a wife, mother, businesswoman, Sunday school teacher and grandmother. As she volunteered in various capacities, she kept wondering, "What if this could be my job?"

One day, while visiting a family member in the hospital, she heard a woman crying in a nearby room. The woman was afraid of dying alone. Inez began visiting her regularly and struck up a friendship. Inez noticed big changes in the woman's outlook - and health. This wasn't lost on hospital staff members, who quickly steered her to other lonely souls.

Around that time, Inez was bombarded by stories of elderly people in need.

"Every time I picked up a newspaper or turned on the television or radio," she recalls, "I just constantly heard about it."

In response, she started Friends for Life, a charity in Texas, serving elderly people. At first, it was just her in a borrowed office with borrowed furniture. She recruited volunteers to visit people in hospitals and nursing homes.

She recalls, "Everything we did seemed to reveal more needs. We found one lady sitting in the dark because all the light bulbs in her house had burned out. So we started a light-bulb-changing program. We found one lady who had been stuck in her house for five years because she didn't have a wheelchair ramp, so we started a ramp-building program."

Today, Friends for Life serves nearly 4,000 people a year in 18 counties. It offers programs for money management, household repair, music and art therapy, therapeutic gardening, Gifts for Grannies and Grandpas (like Toys for Tots), an Intergenerational Center and an educational therapy program for children with learning disabilities.

Simple as that: "You just help people who need help."

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