SPOKANE, Wash. — One former homeless man, Rick Clark, inspires people to give back to his Spokane community, most recently by leading a fundraiser that will help local families stay warmer this winter.
“I grew up in this town, experienced homelessness, poverty, and all of the stuff that comes with poverty,” Clark said, “so if there’s any way that I can give back now that I have an army of people behind me to help, that’s all I want to do.”
The ‘army’ Clark is referring to are the more than 35,000 people who follow his ‘Giving Back Spokane’ Facebook page.
“We try to use social media in a good way, so we are able to mobilize over 30,000 community members to do good things in Spokane,” Clark said.
Most recently, Clark inspired his page followers to help every student at Lumen High School receive a $100 Visa gift card so that they could go shopping for warm winter clothes for themselves and their children.
“We wanna walk side by side with them and show our support, and so in 3 days we raised $6,600 and it was just a bunch of five dollar, ten dollar donations…it was a group effort,” Clark said.
He said that group effort included Cheney Federal Credit Union reaching out to help.
“After we raised the money, Cheney federal credit Union reached out and said her we saw what you did, we’d like to offer to print those Visa cards for you and wave the fees that come along with them,” Clark said. “They saved us several hundred dollars by reaching out and saying we wanna do this too, so it was definitely a community effort.”
On Thursday morning, he hand delivered 66 envelopes, each one containing one of those gift cards, to the school’s social worker, Tracie Fowler.
“It means a lot,” Fowler said. “This is the second year that Giving Back Spokane has sponsored winter shopping for our students, and it makes a huge difference.”
Fowler said she plans to take students on a shopping spree next week so they can use their gift cards to buy warm clothes for themselves and their little ones.
“I think it’s a lot of support,” said Lumen student Mileeyah Brough. “Sometimes us parents go without so that our kids can have what they need.”
Fellow student and mom, Payton Garza, said she’ll be looking for rain boots and gloves.
“As parents we don’t like spending money on ourselves, we’d rather spend it on our kids,” Garza said.
Thanks to Clark and the Spokane community, they can do both.
“I know that the need is still out there… and we want to remove the stigma that comes with poverty,” Clark said, “so that’s what I’ll do the rest of my life, and luckily I have 33,000 friends that want to help me do it.”
