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Heidi Yacker is one of the most loyal and steadfast friends Friendship Place has ever had. While serving as a volunteer during the past five years, she has been a behind-the-scenes dynamo week after week—doing whatever needs doing to help our AimHire program get people into a home and into a job: answering phones, greeting clients, organizing office space, posting job listings, shopping for supplies. “If we’re out of pens, paper, paper towels or cleaning supplies,” she says. “I make a list and get what’s needed.”

Heidi has seen firsthand the rapid-response approach AimHire takes to its dual mission to end homelessness and joblessness at the same time. And often, she says, it doesn’t take much to make a huge difference in people’s lives.

For one man, she says, his ticket out of homelessness and into a job was getting the license needed to work in the DC food industry. AimHire stepped him to help navigate the paperwork, and today he’s a chef at an organization that feeds those in need.

She remembers another young man with a wife and kids who came in distraught because he’d gotten a job but had no money for the tool belt required for the work. “Next thing I know’” says Heidi, “people in the office were on the phones calling hardware stores, checking around. They came in the next day with a belt and tools. They just dropped everything and moved heaven and earth to help this family.”

“For me,” says Heidi, “volunteering at Friendship Place has given me a sense of purpose, a chance to see the kind of straightforward and simple things this organization does day in and day out to extend a helping hand to people who are struggling. It has been an honor and an inspiration to play a small part in that.”

And you, Heidi, have been an inspiration to us all at Friendship Place.