James Roach

Working with animals was so important to James Roach that he retired early from his job to become a volunteer with Citizens for Animal Protection (CAP) in Houston. He learned early from his mother about the importance of giving back to others, and for him, animals fit that bill.

“My passion for animals filled that void for me,” he said. “There are so many abandoned or abused that have no one to speak for them.”

James Roach helping a furry friend in need.

In his previous career, Roach, 55, worked for a hand surgeon. In 2013, he pivoted to apply those skills to working with animals who come into veterinarian offices for surgery. Today, he works three-to-four days a week, fulfilling almost any job available in the clinics.

Since his first day, he’s devoted 1,086 hours to making dogs and cats comfortable before, during, and after surgical procedures. His typical day begins at 8:45 a.m., preparing rooms and tools for various cases, as well as setting out food for the animals when they wake. During surgeries, he monitors their heart rate, oxygen levels, and blood pressure to report any changes to the veterinarian as they occur.

After surgeries, Roach makes sure the animals recover well from the anesthesia and keeps them warm. He said he feels he makes a significant impact for veterinarians, the pet owners, and the animals because he gives so much of his time and pitches in wherever the needs are greatest.

While he finds fulfillment working with animals, he advocated that everyone find a volunteer opportunity that feeds into something they feel strongly about.

“Definitely do whatever you’re passionate about. My passion is animals, but there are lots of things you can be passionate about – working with the elderly, the homeless, or the hungry,” he said. “There’s so much opportunity out there. There’s something for everyone.”

To find opportunities near you, check out All for Good for projects that you’re passionate about!

Suzanne Chimera

Suzanne Chimera became a cosmetologist upon graduating from high school in 1990. She began working at Manny Roberts Hair Replacement in 1994. Since 2006, Chimera has traveled to countless cosmetology classrooms to lecture on the devastating effects hair loss can have on a person.

After one of Chimera’s clients appeared on 20/20 in an episode about strange afflictions, Chimera received a call from the mother of a 13-year-old with alopecia, who said she would “do anything for that wig.” The young girl was severely depressed and was being home schooled because she could not face the bullying from her classmates. The cost and maintenance of a custom made human hair wig was something this family could not afford. Chimera made a promise to get that wig; she posted on Facebook asking the community for blonde ponytails. In one week, she received 42 ponytails and the wig was made from hair donated by her friends and family and Hair We Share was born.

Suzanne Chimera

Chimera is now the president and co-founder of Hair We Share. Hair We Share makes wigs using donated ponytails and gives them to people with medical hair loss at no cost. Chimera matches ponytail donors to recipients.

Most of the ponytails come from children. It is a very special experience because they get to see who received their precious gift. Recipients of the wigs receive them for free. The wigs are custom made human hair that would not otherwise be affordable to the average person. The recipients get a sense of community when they see all of these people that get together to make this happen.

As a wig designer for 20 years Chimera has seen many different people suffering hair loss for many different reasons, but they all have the same feeling of being alone and afraid of what other people will think of them. She has serviced clients for several reasons ranging from chemotherapy, car accidents, burns to violent attacks.

Chimera has helped 12 people with custom-made wigs in the last year. She has made a huge impact in the lives of young girls helping them to feel beautiful, confident, and a sense of community. Each wig is designed for the recipient, this means the hair is selected based on color, texture, length and density, the cap is constructed to fit the recipients head exactly and the cap materials used are chosen based on the type of hair loss. It is personal “celebrity style” service and the results are like no other.

Chimera has taken the effort to create a way for those with medical hair loss to be made whole while getting the community to get involved. You can find ways to get involved too by checking out All for Good for projects near you! 

Wicksburg Volunteer Fire and Rescue

The call can come when he’s cutting grass or watching his 8-year-old son play baseball on a Sunday morning when he’s sitting in a church pew or a Tuesday night when he’s in a deep slumber. When it happens, Chad Dickerson, 33, is ready and on his way in seconds. As a member of the all-volunteer Fire & Rescue Department in Wicksburg, Alabama, Dickerson is prepared — whether it’s to respond to a fire or to help an elderly person who has fallen.

“I consider every call important, and it’s always a team effort — so I can’t let anybody down,” he says. “It’s a lot of pressure — but very rewarding. The folks we help always end up apologizing for interrupting us. We’re trying to take care of them and they’re watching out for us.”

Dickerson says he sometimes works 24 hours straight if a natural disaster like a major storm occurs, while other weeks all is calm and he uses the time to “take care of things around the station like fixing flats and repairing the equipment. Then,” he adds with a laugh, “the full moon arrives and things pick up again.”

For Dickerson, who works full-time as a heavy equipment operator for the State of Alabama, volunteering in this way is a family affair. His grandfather was involved with founding the department 40 years ago and, as a young boy, Dickerson often accompanied his dad on emergency runs. These days, even his wife volunteers as an emergency medical technician.

Fire Chief Wanda Andress, 46, is also following in her family’s footsteps. Two of her older brothers volunteered for the department while she was in high school and as soon as she graduated, she joined them. Nearly 30 years later, she’s still at it. A teacher by day, she heads to the station as soon as school is over and starts what amounts to a second job — putting in about 25 hours a week to dispatch volunteers and take care of administrative tasks.

Her team makes about 600 calls a year, about three-quarters of which are rescue runs. “We take care of a little bit of everything from helping stranded people to ambulance calls for heart attacks to removing children from house fires. We also go into the schools to talk about fire safety and prevention,” she says.

The department serves about 40,000 people in an unincorporated part of Houston County. “It could take 30-45 minutes to get an ambulance or fire truck from elsewhere out here,” Andress says. “So although it’s a hard thing for volunteers to mix this into their work and personal lives, they’re committed because they know if we didn’t do it, our community would suffer.”

Andress says she can always use more volunteers but for those who can’t spare the time, there are other ways to help. For example, several times a year, the department stages fundraisers or offers raffles to raise money for equipment.

“The outpouring of people who help in so many ways makes me proud,” says Dickerson. “We’re like a family — we’re all in this together. We’re a small community and I reckon I’m stuck in the old world where everyone helps their neighbor.”

Sarah Wijnen-Reims

The effects of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 were some of the worst in Honduras history. It resulted in thousands of deaths, over 2 billion dollars in damage, and over 1 million people homeless. Almost 20 years later, unfortunately, not much has changed.

Aware of the devastation is Sarah Wijnen-Reims. She traveled to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on a Mission Trip to give people a special gift. Not one that is monetary or material — instead, it’s a gift of compassion, the gift of volunteering.

Sarah spent seven days providing a sense of hope and happiness to the people of Honduras. She helped deliver food and water to starving civilians, and even assisted with a toy drive that placed smiles on children’s faces for the very first time.

With the devastation still existing two decades later, it’s going to take a unified effort to restore Honduras. And that effort, as Sarah has shown, comes in the form of volunteering.

“I try to tell my children always to give more than what is expected,” says Sarah. “Because someday you may find yourself in a situation where you may need a helping hand.”

With Sarah preaching to her daughters the importance of volunteering, they have fully adopted the act of selflessness. So much so that they are paving their own path as volunteer vanguards.

Sarah is plagued with a rare blood disorder called ITP, characterized by a low count of platelets in the blood which can cause excessive bleeding. Wanting to assist, her daughter organized a blood drive at the Central Blood Bank in Pennsylvania resulting in 25 blood donations.

Whether it’s helping restore land in Honduras, or organizing blood drives domestically, the gift of volunteering is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Komal Ahmad

Hunger isn’t just a global problem — it’s the “world’s dumbest problem.” At least, that’s how Komal Ahmad, founder and CEO of COPIA, sees it anyway. She’s making it her life’s mission to eradicate it one city at a time with technology that seamlessly delivers excess food from restaurants, grocery stores, companies, and events to people in need. Her company has already helped to feed hundreds of thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area, and it expects to feed over a million this year alone.

Komal Ahmad

Of course, there is nothing stupid about hunger. According to Feeding America, there are approximately 50 million Americans living in “food insecure” households, including more than 15 million children. This is all while 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food are thrown away every day. But Ahmad, who has been focusing on streamlining ways to feed the hungry since she was a senior in college at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that for problems that feel so overwhelming as hunger and food waste, the answer is simpler than we realize. “There’s not a problem that is so grandiose in scale that has such an obvious solution as hunger does,” the 26-year-old tells Points of Light. “Eradicating hunger requires better distribution systems. This is what COPIA is creating. The world’s most effective and efficient global food redistribution system.”

Historically, charitable organizations have tried to meet the challenge of feeding America’s hungry, but falling donations and increasing need have made their success difficult. Moreover, these organizations have failed to realize that hunger in the United States occurs not due to a lack of food, but due to an inequitable distribution of it.

Against this backdrop, in 2013, Ahmad founded COPIA, a technology-based platform that connects businesses with excess food to people in need. Through this mobile and web app, businesses can request food pick-ups, and COPIA will dispatch a Food Hero (a trained driver) to pick it up and deliver it to the nearest shelter, after school program, or nonprofit in need.

So how does COPIA work exactly? “We’re Match.com meets Uber for food recovery,” Ahmad explains. First, use COPIA’s app or site to identify yourself as a food donor or food recipient. Non-profits looking for food donations can register directly on COPIA’s website. Once verified, they can place a request for what types of food they are looking for, when, and how much. COPIA food donors can be anyone — from restaurants, grocery stores, farms, and catering companies looking to get rid of surplus perishable items, to private events that over-ordered food.

If you are a donor, simply express how much surplus food you have, and request a pickup. COPIA’s algorithm will match the surplus food with recipients currently looking for food donations of that amount and type. Then, a certified driver from COPIA’s Food Hero team will pick up the food, and distribute it to where it’s most needed at the time. For instance, if a company has 2,000 pounds of food leftover after a conference, 500 pounds of that food might go to a veteran’s agency, while another 500 pounds might go to a women’s shelter — and so on, until the food has been entirely divvied up. It’s all about figuring out who has the capacity to accept what and when. “Whenever we have an incoming donation, we will match the amount and type of food to the non-profit that’s open and able to put that food to the best use for the most amount of people. We never let food go to waste.” Ahmad says. Not only is her system an efficient way to bring food to the hungry, it also saves businesses money by lowering disposal and overproduction costs and reduces methane by keeping food out of landfills.

If it seems simple, that’s because it is. Since its start, COPIA has recovered more than 800,000 pounds of food. This has provided COPIA’s food donors with over $4.6 million in savings and enabled COPIA to feed over 700,000 people — for reference, that is the equivalent of feeding the entire population of Luxembourg. During Super Bowl 50 alone, which took place in nearby Santa Clara, Ahmad and her team recovered 14 tons of high quality food — enough to fill four 16-foot-long refrigerated trucks to the brim, and feed 23,000 people at non-profits and shelters all over the San Francisco Bay Area.

The piece of technology that COPIA’s built is so extraordinarily sophisticated that it can also be applied to other situations. This means that one day, COPIA could redistribute more than just food – medicine, medical supplies, books, clothing and so on. “If I were going to dedicate my life to something, it wouldn’t be something small scale,” she tells Points of Light. “If I were going to dedicate my life to something, it would be something that could move us forward as a global society. Something that could transcend borders. This is why we have built COPIA to scale — so that we can dramatically improve lives of people globally.”

Want to join COPIA in doing good, saving money, and feeding a lot of people? Sign up your company or event to join the movement by donating their excess food to COPIA. Find other ways to support COPIA on their website —- it is all of our responsibilities to help solve hunger: the world’s dumbest problem.