When Bob Massey and Reid Conklin think about the true reward of their work with Neighbors Helping Neighbors, time and time again they point back to the stories they’ve seen unfold thanks to the organization.

Take, for instance, the single mother of a 12-year-old boy with spina bifida. Through their work with other local organizations, the two have known this child since he was just 3 years old.

“This is a single mom with this child who needs 24-hour care, is on oxygen 24 hours and is essentially bed-bound,” explains Massey, president of NHN.

One day, they received a call about issues with the vehicle the mom uses to take her son to monthly doctor’s visits in Atlanta. The car windows were frozen shut and the air conditioning had gone out. The estimate for repair was $2,200. This mother hasn’t been able to work for 12 years, and her husband walked out long ago. After having the vehicle checked out, Massey was told that it could be fixed for that amount but that it wouldn’t last long.

So, NHN went to work.

The organization gave the mom a “hand up” — a Honda Odyssey with sliding doors for easier transfer in and out of the vehicle, low mileage and good quality.

“When you can change her life that way… This woman is one of my heroes,” Massey said. “She is incredible. She knows more than the nurses who come in. She gets public assistance and nurses coming in, but she’s basically been on call 24 hours a day for 12 years.”

“When you see the people and the situations they’re in, there’s nothing more gratifying,” added Conklin, vice president of NHN. “These are people who are there by no fault of their own.”

Just four years into its existence, the two can share a multitude of similar stories about the difference the organization is making in both Greene and Putnam counties.

NHN began in the fall of 2020 when Massey, Conklin and three other founding members saw the need through their work with other local organizations. Massey and Conklin had both been involved with several service projects through their membership in Rotary Club, but they saw that the need was greater than what Rotary alone could handle.

“I was well aware that there’s a huge gap in what the community needed as far as a lot of people living in very impoverished situations, a lot of people with health issues that they couldn’t get around their homes, they couldn’t get into bathtubs, just all sorts of areas that were not being covered,” Massey said.

Thus launched their idea to form an organization that would be member-based in which they would raise funds through membership dues and reach out to others community entities in hopes that they would donate as well.

There were a couple of key things the founders wanted to be sure they did from the beginning. First, they wanted 100% of donations to go toward the end projects, and so the board decided they would pay overhead costs such as insurance and tax preparations themselves. And secondly, they decided to thoroughly vet the people they would be helping.

“We wanted to help people who genuinely had a need and give a hand up rather than a handout, and so that’s remained a very strong piece of our organization,” Massey saids. “We do a very efficient job of making sure that these people really have exhausted every other method for resolving the problem.”

NHN has three areas of focus. One is critical home repairs. These are for one-time critical needs, and NHN pays for the materials and the contracted work.

“If you’ve got a really big problem in your house — the roof’s caving in or you’ve fallen and hurt yourself and you can’t get into the bathtub, we might come in and replace it with a walk-in shower or something like that,” Conklin said.

“We do a lot of roof replacements; we do a lot of floor replacements where the leaking roof rotted the floors,” Massey added. “Those are critical repairs. You don’t want someone living in a house with buckets all over the place catching rainwater.”

The next area of focus is vehicle repairs or replacements.

“The people that we’ve helped the most over the last four years in this regard have been single moms,” Conklin said. “If a single mom with kids can’t get to the doctor, can’t get to the store, can’t get to her job because she doesn’t have transportation, that’s a real issue and then that of course affects the rest of their lifestyle in a huge way.”

Conklin says if people don’t have a vehicle or if it’s been totaled in a wreck, NHN tries to get cars donated and then has the title transferred over to the recipient.

NHN’s third area of focus came along a few months after its founding when a need was realized in the two counties they serve.

“We discovered that there are hundreds and hundreds of kids in both counties that don’t have a bed to sleep in at night,” Conklin said.

Both Greene and Putnam counties have high rates of poverty, and NHN leaders learned that particularly in impoverished families with kids, there were many who didn’t have a bed.

“They’re sleeping on the floor, they’re sleeping on a couch, they’re sleeping in maybe a double bed with two other siblings,” Conklin said. “We’ve run into all kinds of things like that.”

And so, NHN began a partnership with Greensboro First Methodist Church in which NHN finds the recipients and supplies the materials and money, and the church’s mission team builds the beds. They make singles or bunks when necessary. In addition to the bed itself, NHN provides the mattress, all bedding and a special stuffed animal.

In just three and half years, they’ve delivered close to 500 beds between the two counties. And many times, they’ve seen kids run through the door like it’s Christmas morning.

“If you talk to these guys that make and deliver these beds, almost every one of them will tell you that at some point in time at one delivery or more, they’ve all been brought to tears…,” Conklin said. “They deliver those beds and [when] they see the smile on the parents’ face as well as the kid’s face, that does it for them and they’ll be building beds as long as we need them to. It’s just the satisfaction and the sense of gratitude that you receive from the people that we’re helping that makes it all worthwhile. That’s why we do what we do.”

Both men say the work that NHN does is thanks to great partnerships within the community. Those partnerships include relationships with the schools, other civic organizations and other nonprofit organizations.

“We really couldn’t have done what we have done over the last four years without our community partners…,” Conklin said. “Our success in large part is due to the other civic organizations in our community that we partner with and that are helping us at the same time while we help them. It’s a team effort for sure.”

Today, there are nine board members for NHN, around 380 members and a core group of about 50 volunteers who are constantly active in meeting critical needs of their neighbors. Massey says for those volunteers, the work is deeply personal.

“When you go out and see these houses and the conditions and the life situations of these people, they become disciples,” he said. “This a cause that is absolutely personally religious to them of helping folks that there’s no one else there to help.”

And for a man who has lived in a number of places throughout his life, Massey says there is something special he has found in the neighbors he has now.

“I have never lived in a community with the generosity or the focus on those in need that this community has,” he said. “It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal place to live.”

For more information, visit nhnga.org.