Donations to our Neighbors In Need campaign during the month of December will appear in a public thank you published in the Courier Herald in the January 28th edition of the Courier Herald (names only, not amounts).

We are so grateful for your donations throughout this campaign.
Thank you so very much.

 As we begin this year’s Neighbors in Need campaign, I keep thinking about a phone call I made earlier this year. A generous gift had been made to POM in honor of a woman who had spent years caring for the donor’s mother. It was meant as a quiet thank you for the kind of steady, everyday love that rarely asks for recognition. The donor described her as “the friend my mother needed,” and that line has stayed with me.

When I called to share that a donation had been made in her honor, she went silent. Then she cried. She told me she had always wished she could give large financial gifts, but life simply didn’t allow for that. She gives in other ways, she said, but sometimes it never feels like enough.

In that moment, it was as if someone finally saw her. Really saw her. The donation felt like gentle validation for all the years she spent showing up, doing what she could, giving care that doesn’t make headlines but holds people together just the same. She couldn’t believe it.

That is why this story feels like the right place to begin this campaign. Neighbors in Need has always been carried by people like her. People who give what they can, in whatever form they can. People who show up because they love their community, even when they’re not sure it matters, or if anyone notices.

When you donate in memory or in honor of a life well lived, we carry that love forward. We honor the stories behind those gifts, and we make sure they become part of the quiet, steady work that lifts our neighbors up. I hope this season reminds all of us that generosity has many ways of finding a home. And that every single one of them makes a difference.  

Warm Wishes and Blessings,

Angie Adam
Director of Community Engagement