Darnell Brame, Director of Operations
I’ve been with Barnabas Network a total of three years now, ever since the beginning when we had our first meetings. What I do is make sure the Furniture Division is running smoothly, where we go out to pick up furniture and how we give out the requests for furniture, all that’s under my umbrella. I make sure all of that is running smoothly.
I got involved through Tim Patterson. Tim Patterson and I met probably two or three years before Barnabas and I know that Holy Trinity had involvement with getting furniture to refugees and I was doing my own furniture ministry out of my garage and we crossed paths and knew a mutual friend in Odell Cleveland of Welfare Reform. We started talking about how we could combine. I needed to take the furniture out of my garage. Tim needed to get furniture out of storage to save money on the cost of storage so we were looking for common warehouse space and combine what we had and maybe do something greater than what we were able to do on our own. And from there it took about three years to get there. We held furniture at Welfare Reform for a while and I headed that up and then there was about a year or year and a half gap where we didn’t do anything. Then Katrina hit and a lot of furniture came into the area where they were helping people get relocated and resettled and they were trying to figure out what they were going to do with all this furniture. They used up all they could use and that’s when they formed a committee to help decide what to do with this furniture. From there we were able to get all that furniture, plus all that we already had, and got a warehouse space. We've been moving forward since.
We are serving mostly those who are moving from homelessness, those who are in domestic violence situations where they’ve had to flee and leave all of their furniture, those who have severe handicaps, children who sleep on the floor. There’s still a segment out there of young working mothers with two or three kids or more and they can’t generate enough money to buy their own furniture and they get caught up in these rent to own scams and it takes a lot more out of their paychecks than they realize. We try not to service those who can buy their own and we do have to turn those away but where we see there’s a real benefit from giving the furniture we try to help there. Most of the agencies do most of the screening but still when they come to us we still have the last word on whether a person can get furniture or not.
Even from the very first year we realized that the need was very much greater than we first thought. We are serving close to 600 families a year and it has grown every year and it’s just been wonderful. We are getting a lot of new people moving into the area-refugees, people who are relocating to Greensboro. It’s been amazing how much the need is out there.
The Barnabas Network means a lot to me and I have certainly not birthed a baby but I would imagine that it would be somewhat similar to that. It started with planning at the point of conception and as that child was born into the world, and a Barnabas was born and you watch it grow and you nurture it to grow. So it really means a lot to me to help it to grow. My mind is churning all the time about what to do next, how to improve on what we’re doing to make sure that we’re running a place of integrity and that we are really affecting change in the community. So it really means a lot to me. I just feel blessed to be a part of it. And I really thank God every day for allowing me to be a part of it My early training from working out of my garage really prepared me for this here at this time.
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