Thank You to Mel and Marge Youngwerth for 23 Years of Service!

Britepaths’ staff and Board of Directors are so grateful to Mel and Marge Youngwerth for 23 years of service to our organization and the families we serve. They are stepping back from their volunteer duties a bit, but we know they will always be part of the Britepaths family. We honored them at our July 21 event to unveil our new name and brand (they are pictured above with Britepaths’ Jennifer Rose). Upon Mel’s retirement as our super Volunteer Check Writer, we wanted to give an extra shout-out to them both for their dedication and energetic support of our work.

Mel and Marge first started volunteering with us in 1993, when we were Our Daily Bread. They came to us as the coordinators of King of Kings Lutheran Church’s delivered food program, which provides food assistance to 30 of our Food Bridge families at least twice a year. Together, they have continued to serve in this capacity for the past 23 years. With Marge and Mel’s guidance, King of Kings became one of our first Food Bridge supporting organizations to distribute grocery store gift cards to our families, which provides our families choice and access to fresh, healthy foods that meet their children’s dietary needs.

Since 1998, Mel, with Marge’s assistance, has served as our volunteer check writer. In that capacity, he issued checks to our vendors and employee expense reimbursements, as well as writing all the checks for our Financial Assistance Program, making sure that checks get to landlords, utility companies and other vendors in a timely manner so that our clients receive the assistance they need to stay in their homes or keep the heat and lights on while they’re working toward financial self-sufficiency.

Marge served on our all-volunteer Board of Directors from 1996 to 1999, and ran our Back to School and Thanksgiving Basket programs in a volunteer capacity for several years in the 1990s. 

Executive Director Lisa Whetzel said, “All of us at Britepaths are so very grateful to Mel and Marge for their years of service, both to our organization and to our families. It is incredible to think of how freely they have given of their time to help our families improve their lives – and to help our staff work more efficiently – over the past 23 years. And the time they devote to us each year has been merely a fraction of the time they spend working through King of Kings and other local organizations to really help lift up our neighbors and make our community a better place. It is impossible to calculate the number of lives they have touched through their work. We are simply in awe of their work, and feel so fortunate that they have chosen to devote so much of their time and energy over the years to helping Britepaths help our neighbors move toward self-sufficiency. Thank you, Mel and Marge!”