Threads of Hope

With our busy lives, our homes, and our families, many of us believe we don’t have the time or energy to volunteer for a good cause. But guess what? The five recipients of Diablo’s 2007 Threads of Hope Awards set a stunning example of how it’s done, as they make major accomplishments in the name of community service.

(page 6 of 6)

Daphne Miller
Food Bank of Contra Costa

Richmond’s 23rd Street is a main thoroughfare running through some of the poor, violent neighborhoods that made Richmond the third most dangerous city in California in 2006. The street is riddled with potholes and lined with rundown storefronts. Its most familiar landmark is Richmond High, better known for dropouts and gangbangers than academic achievement.

Down this street drives a tiny, 83-year-old great-grandmother in flip-flops. She is from Pleasant Hill, a safer, more affluent suburb on the other side of the East Bay hills. Her name is Daphne Miller, and she’s a Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano volunteer who delivers food to AIDS patients in Richmond.

"[Miller is] filling a position we wouldn’t be able to with our staff,” says Leslie Tolman, the Food Bank’s community distribution coordinator. “She never complains, and she’s always got a smile. She’s really a great example to all of us of being of service to the community.”
 

Miller makes her deliveries two Fridays a month, rain or shine. The houses she visits are, for the most part, small buildings, some with scraggly, weed-strewn lawns, and the people who live in them are too poor and too sick to shop for themselves.

“She’s a wonderful woman,” says Bill, a gaunt middle-aged man afflicted with AIDS and neuropathy, who is a regular recipient on Miller’s route. “I wouldn’t be able to [get food] unless it was for people like Daphne. It would be too much for me.”

Tolman estimates that Miller delivers about 15,000 pounds of food a year for the Food Bank—and that is just one of her many humanitarian endeavors.

She is involved in helping the less fortunate nearly every day of the week: Monday, she works the breadline at St. Anthony’s Church in San Francisco; Tuesday, she drives cancer patients to their appointments; Wednesday, she delivers food for Meals on Wheels. On the weekends, she gets paid to work at Concord House, a home for people with developmental disabilities. Ask her how she has the energy to do all that volunteering, and she just laughs.

“A lot of times, people look and say, ‘What can I do?’ ” says Miller, a retired school bus driver. “Well, if you look, there are lots of things to do every day. How can you sit at home? If you’re able, I think one should help those who need help.”

With that, she starts the engine of her car and off she goes, ready to make another delivery.