GRANDVIEW, Mo. — Last weekend, volunteers at the non-profit Flourish: A Furniture Bank were caught off guard when they discovered that one of their trucks was out of commission because of a hole in the gas tank.
They suspect that someone drilled the hole in an attempt to steal gas.
“Panic was the first response,” said Elinore Noyes, who works for the organization. “It was very, very upsetting and a huge block to what we're trying to do here.”
According to her, the truck is the most important piece of their operations. The organization provides furniture for families dealing with housing insecurity.
That means that without the truck, their numbers go down. Twenty pickups were canceled this past week, and they expect to help 30 fewer families this month.
“The fact is that it happened, and it created a difficult circumstance for us. But we're not going to change that,” said Amy Cox, Flourish: A Furniture Bank’s executive director.
They chose to move forward and shelved the decision to reach out to the police.
“We know that vandalism in general is a fairly common occurrence and that it's unlikely to be prosecuted,” Cox said.
Instead, they took a different route — empathy.
“We don't agree with this choice, but we may not understand why it was made,” Cox said.
“Giving the benefit of the doubt, we should assume that somebody was in a really hard place and this was what they saw as their best option,” Noyes said.
The challenge is fueling them. With community support, they raised almost all the money needed to cover the costs of fixing the truck, which is more than $4,000.
“To see people from all across our community — volunteers, donors, and families that have received services — jumping in to support us and ensure these trucks get repaired and back on the road has been extremely heartwarming and reassuring,” Noyes said.
It's a feeling they don't take for granted.
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