WTH Bi-Weekly Blog June 26, 2026

Christopher Olsen, Founder and Board of Trustees President

This WTH BWB was composed primarily from dictating into a new A.I. notetaking device:

Hey, this is Chris, the founder and board of trustees’ president for Welcome to Housing Home Goods Bank Incorporated, a completely volunteer-driven 501(c)(3) nonprofit furniture banker in the grand state of Maine. And it's time for me to work a little bit on the biweekly blog, the WTHBWB for Friday, June 26th in the year of our Lord 2026. Anyway, there is a lot going on. One of the things I should probably check with Lisa first, but I actually approached Lisa Maxcy about the possibility of studying under me, so that if ever comes a time, which it will, eventually, where I could use a hand overseeing Welcome to Housing, it won't be just like, “Oh, Chris can't do it anymore,” and watch the organization go down the crapper.

I've seen that happen. I heard about it with Direction Sports. Direction Sports was founded and run by a man named Tully Brown. Tully Brown was from California, and he had twin daughters—(he passed away sadly, God rest his soul). One of them was Kimberly Brown, who was a newscaster on WCSH, which is now part of NewsCenter Maine, along with Channel 6 out of Portland.

Her father was a great guy. I got to meet him when he visited Maine and told the local United Way about Direction Sports. What they did was combine education with sports. And they said the first two visits were really disasters. What they did was pair up street kids, wise guys pretty much, with developmentally disabled kids. And like I said, the first two visits apparently went really poorly. The kids with the developmental issues were building things out of blocks, and the street kids thought it'd be funny to just knock everything down. They'd be playing frisbee, and the street kids would throw the frisbee the wrong way and laugh as the special needs kids had to chase them. When it came time for the third visit, the light came on in the street kids' minds and hearts. They pulled up in a bus, and the special needs kids were clinging to the fence. They were so excited and happy and eager to see these kids as they arrived. All of a sudden, it really hit all the kids in the bus, that their visit actually meant a LOT. In Compton and Watts in California, where there's a high rearrest rate, a recidivism rate was above fifty percent. In other words, if you were picked up for a crime, fifty percent chance you'd be picked up for another crime. Well, when they instituted this program, they ended up reducing the rearrest rate from fifty percent down to less than ten percent. And here's one example of  how they did it: they got kids playing basketball for instance, and the ref would blow the whistle and go back and forth with one of the players and say, okay, history question, math question, science question, whatever it might be. All right. Blow the whistle. They keep playing again. There goes the whistle again. Another kid gets a question and answer. If you think about it, when you're doing athletics, you're getting energy out. And if you think about when you were growing up in the classroom, the kids that were the most disruptive had a lot of energy, but they didn't know how to direct it. Anyway, that was a great program.

They tried to get it off the ground here, through the United Way, and unfortunately no one grabbed onto it. I went back through on the internet. It turns out that after Tully passed away, and the organization ran out of money they closed it down.

That's what I am trying to prevent with Welcome to Housing. And there are so many good examples of successful programs.  Sedomocha School, which is named from initials.  The S E is from Sebec, D O is from Dover Foxcroft, M O is from Monson, C H A is from Charleston. Sedomocha sounds like a chocolate milk drink. They had kids arriving at school who were really disruptive and were acting up and just basically screwing things up for the other kids that were actually there to learn. Well, they did a little checking around. Turns out the kids that were acting up the most, they weren't bad kids. They had not had a decent meal or any meal before they got to school. And if you're diabetic like myself, you know when your blood sugar is low or your electrolytes are off. You get all quivery and shaky.

So, in other words, these kids were getting on the bus in the morning without eating much of anything, and then they're acting up. Now, when I worked at the March of Dimes years ago, that was my first paid gig as a professional fundraiser, professional nonprofit manager. When we had staff meetings, we would either have Lewiston and Portland staff come up to Brewer, which was the state office, or we'd go down to Portland or Lewiston.

I always noticed when we got into these meetings, we got a lot done. That is until sometime after 1:00 and everybody would start getting cranky and short-tempered. I would think, "Wait, wait a minute, what's going on here?" The problem was we were all a bunch of workaholics, but we would all be getting hungry and not realize it. So, once we finally figured that out and started eating lunch at a reasonable time, we were balanced and our meetings went a lot better. I really miss my mentor, Fred Austin. His wife is still around; she's his widow, I should say—she's ninety-seven, the sweetest lady in the world. They had a son named David. David's all grown up; he's a very incredibly nice and successful attorney down in southern Maine. He's married to his wife Kelly, and I believe they have a couple of kids.

Sadly, Fred ended up with Alzheimer's. And the last time I saw him alive, was at Hannaford in Brewer. And he was just about in tears because he knew who I was, but his Alzheimer's prevented him from remembering my name. I remember once in a while Fred would come into the office, especially when he came back from Portland. Fred finally confided to all of us as to what happened when he sneezed.

He said, "My head felt like it was going to explode.” I don't know if it was blood pressure or what it was, but it just really affected him. Fred was the  nicest guy in the world. The funny stories about Fred that were so enjoyable to me included him talking about Pike's Peak in Colorado. Fred had a dry sense of humor. He said he went up Pike's Peak with his girlfriend long before he met Vicki, his wife, and on the way down, the ball joints went in this car (Pike's Peak, it is one very steep drive both up and down). Apparently when the ball joints gave out, it made it hard to handle the car. He looked at me and said, "She never called me after that." I was dying of laughter after he said that. The other funny thing, (and I learned more about it from Vicki) was how they met while on the same bus as she was going down to see HER fiancé. I mean, this couple, Fred and Victoria Austin, were very, very much in love. Fred was an incredible mentor to me.

Mentoring…Giving a lot of thought to that and talking about that lately. As a matter of fact, I went out and purchased, out of my own pocket, a couple of books on volunteer retention. I have no problem recruiting volunteers and I do pretty well at retaining them. But I want everybody to be as educated as they can be with Welcome to Housing so that we can be successful and be around for years. I mean, years and years after I am gone. Unfortunately, my wife and I never had kids; we have six Maine coon cats, but I wanted to leave a legacy and I think Welcome to Housing Home Goods Bank is a pretty good legacy.

We've helped thousands of people. We just finished a grant application. I was up until after two in the morning Sunday night, and we got it submitted, and it's an organization that we have applied to three times prior. So, this is number four and the dilemma that we ran into was the fact that the person that is the contact for the grant didn't seem to understand that we are direct service. We went through this before when we applied for the grant the third time. The University of Maine technical writing class under Katie Swacha contacted the foundation, and they did not understand that we are direct service. They assumed that we got a bunch of stuff and just handed it out to the agencies to hand out to the clients. It's like no, no, we are direct service. The agencies direct people to us. Most of them come to us through an agency, not all of them. I get calls, all hours of the morning, noon, and nights, weekends, holidays.  I don't mind because I can put myself in their shoes, and think, oh, my gosh. I have a crisis. It's like having AAA. You have AAA because if your car doesn't start—Or you're locked out of your car, you can call AAA. They'll come and help you, and it doesn't matter a tinker's darn where you are, or what time of day it is, or what the weather is. They're going to be there for you. There was only one time they weren't there for me. One time I got my car stuck in the mud, while I was doing a broker price opinion, not realizing I had traction control. This twenty-something came and pulled me out and said, "You know your Nissan's got traction control. If you took it off, you could probably get out." So that was in the spring when it was muddy. In the wintertime, I went down a residential road, dirt road, basically it could be perceived as a camp road. I took my pictures and the owner of the home was there; his dog was barking up a storm. The owner came out; he was a surveyor and a really pleasant guy. I explained I was just down there for a minute to take some exterior shots, so I started on my merry way. Four times trying to get up going forward and the fifth time I tried to go backwards. Called AAA. AAA said, "Oh, you know what? We can't send a truck down there."

I said, “Couldn’t they put chains on the tires?” "Oh, we can't risk losing a truck down the end of that road." And I'm thinking that's not helpful. And, then the lady at Triple A said, oh, why don't you sand the road? And then—I very politely said, "Well, first of all, it's not my road." Said second of all, I came down here for about, hopefully, about thirty seconds to take a couple of exterior photos of a home, go up the hill and be on my merry way. So still down there. Then I remembered what that twenty-something said when I got stuck in the mud. He said, if you take the traction control and shut it off, you probably could have gotten out of the mud. Well by jingo, I took my traction control off. I hit the little button, and Lickety split right up the hill no problem.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to taking advantage of the fact that we won the award for the SCORE Success for a nonprofit. We have that. We have a recent grant that we received for $10,000 from Narragansett Number One Foundation, and I just did a promotional video and I'm hoping we are selected by the Husson University students who oversee a student-run organization that’s essentially an ad agency. It’s headed up by school staffer Nancy Roberts. She’s a great lady. She used to be with United Way for years. We put in an application, didn't hear anything so I applied again. I'm hoping we can work with them.

Yes, it's three hundred dollars, but you know what? If they are working with a nonprofit, and they go to the expense of putting everything together, and all of a sudden, the nonprofit partway through says, "You know what? We're all set. We're not going to use it.” That ensures you're putting your money where your mouth is. And I can tell you that any time a group is enthusiastic about working with us, I grab on and just watch amazing things happen. Well, anyway, I am hoping that works out. What we're going to do is focus on volunteer development. You know, getting people for the warehouse is important, but it's also very important for all the different committees we have. The governance committee which is nominating people for different boards and teams. And the only two groups that are really called committees are the finance committee and governance committee. The rest of them are teams: marketing team, fundraising team.

Tabling events are part of public outreach team. The only issue is when you go out in public like when you're at the Bangor Public Library for a couple of hours once a month, chances are you're running into people that you can help because a lot of homeless people go down there. But we also need to get the word out in front of some groups like Fusion Bangor. Fusion Bangor I've mentioned before is the modern-day version of the Jaycees or Junior Chamber of Commerce, and they have a fabulous Fusion Bangor group around here. And thankfully, Lisa Maxey and her husband Glenn can go attend those once in a while. First one they went to, I was there and they ended up winning prizes. She ended up winning a grill, and he ended up winning an outdoor wireless speaker, so you could play tunes.

But for the first time ever, used my Plaud Note Pro. It's been absolutely fabulous because I can dictate into it, and compared to talking into Microsoft Word, it gets it right a lot more often. You can  also attach it to the back of your phone as the case has a magnet. Conversations will get transferred to that, or you can just transfer onto your computer directly. Speaking of computers, I really want to say hats off to Lisa Maxcy because in the end of October of this year, Microsoft is doing away with support and doing away with Microsoft Publisher.

Microsoft Publisher has got to be one of my favorite programs. Turns out what they're going to do is they're going to take some of the features of Microsoft Publisher and spread it out between Word and a couple of other newer Microsoft programs I've never heard of.  I HAVE, however, heard a LOT about Canva. And up until recently the only experience I had with Canva was when Chip Leakas from LinkedIn helped me go into my personal LinkedIn page, which now has 1,423 followers, and helped me create a banner that had "Welcome to Housing" on it. The LinkedIn page for "Welcome to Housing," which now has 685 followers, which is fabulous.

Every month you’re allowed to invite up to 50 new followers.  I invite them to follow Welcome to Housing, so it's growing. And the nice thing about it is, it's growing organically. It's clicking and sending, clicking and sending and doesn’t cost anything. So that being said, things are going well. I am looking forward to our meeting with the board on Tuesday, June 30th. We were hoping to do some sort of a cookout, barbecue, grilling, whatever over Joe's. But Joe Lawler has been very busy. I am thinking maybe we could do something in July or August. But I have to tell you this group of volunteers I am working with now is phenomenal.

Some more good news too. If you've ever been up to our warehouse, the door that we use the most is right off the driveway. It's a glass-framed door with “sidelights’ on either side of that glass-framed door are what are called sidelights. In other words, big glass windowpanes that are full length from going from your feet up to above your head. And that door, I refer to it now as Frankendoor was just really, really messed up. It's been bolted and screwed back together—the door frame and so forth. So, we finally bit the bullet—we had money for it. We special ordered a door, a French door, so the sidelights on both sides and the main door are coming out, and they're going to reframe it so we can have a French door. And the reason it was a little bit more time-consuming is code. We have to have one door that opens outward, and that will be the door that we'll be using the most. It'll be on the right side if you're facing inside the building. It's that way because if there's a fire, you want to be able to push the door outwards and escape.

The door that will be on the left will primarily be just closed for the most part, locked in place unless we are bringing in or taking out larger items. So that'll be great on our knuckles and we're going back to a simple, simple doorknob with a lock on it. Years ago, we had the idea—let's get these really nice door locks. Instead of the knob, it has the code lock mechanism built in. One lady that thought she could move a couch out by herself, refused to get any help. Nobody stopped her, and she managed to destroy one of those lock units. And those are about a $120 each AND you can't fix them.

I am looking forward to having a new door there. And we also, after going to the Penobscot Job Corps meeting, Jan Doucette was there and myself, and there was even the director of—the new director of—Eastern Maine Community College there, and I had a chance to talk with him and also asked him to be a guest on my podcast. They have a program at Job Corps that once we get money from the City of Old Town (facade grant money), we could probably work with a couple of mason carpenters and get the materials we need to revamp the porch. The porch has lattice work around the edge and some of the planks are just really tough shape.

The house itself—is from the 1820s and it predates Old Town. That whole area at that time, the 1820s, Maine was just becoming a state. That whole area was called Stillwater Plantation. Well, Stillwater Plantation ended up having Orono break away and at one point, after Orono broke away, Old Town broke away, and now we have Old Town. Stillwater is still there. So, needless to say the house is fascinating; it's very spirited. I've mentioned it before, but the fact that we don't owe a penny, the fact that we now have a 24 solar panel array that will be covering eighty percent of our electrical needs. We need it too because of the fact of two things. Number one, we have heat pumps which heat and cool. We have three-unit heat pump. And, the other thing is, if we're going to be rescuing tonnage from the landfill or the transfer station, like in 2024, we estimated that we saved about 46.8 tons of furniture and other things from going into the landfill early. In other words, getting stuff that's perfectly useful and giving it a few more years of life. That, in itself, shows that we are environmentally friendly. The fact that we went with a three-unit heat pump system—now we have solar to offset the cost. That's another good tiny carbon footprint gesture for us. The other reason is that I really didn't want to have a different heating source there—

We have a couple of electric heaters. One is in the accessible bathroom, because it's further away from the main rooms of the house. But didn't really want fossil fuels. I'm not a fan of natural gas, because if you've ever opened up a newspaper and you see a black smudge—it looks like the ink ran, but no, it's not a black smudge. It's the burned remains of something that blew up because of gas. Yes, it's safer, but it still happens. The other thing is heating oil. Heating oil goes up like there's no tomorrow. And if you're using kerosene, like a Rinnai heater or natural gas or number ten heating oil, it's fine if there's somebody there 24/7. But because we're not there, we're talking about not only fossil fuels, but also the fact that there's flame, and that is a big, sturdy, beautiful house. Old Town has had more than enough fires. They've lost an apartment house; they've lost some businesses and so forth. And we just want to keep it a safe, beautiful place. As a matter of fact, I probably mentioned it in a prior blog, but there was a lady that contacted me one time. She had some furniture to donate and she said, "Oh by the way, I am so glad to see what you are doing with 333 Main Street." And then she elaborated, apparently her grandparents used to own the house. It was a residence, and she had some wonderful memories of her childhood playing there, and that just felt really good.

Well, there’s more to write but I will save that for the next installment of the WTH BWB.

Sincerely yours,

Christopher Olsen
Founder and Board of Trustees President