SEQUIM — Betty Barnard, 85, is a volunteer by nature.
And though she is giving up her duties as an emergency services volunteer for the Peninsula Daily News’ Peninsula Home Fund, which is overseen by Olympic Community Action Programs, better known as OlyCAP, and for a similar program through local churches called Manna, she already is thinking about where she might continue volunteering.
“I’m not noble,” she said.
“I think if it isn’t something that makes you feel good, you wouldn’t do it.”
Barnard has been volunteering at OlyCAP for five of her decades on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Her duties at both OlyCAP and Manna entail interviewing people who need help and then finding resources that might help them.
Caring never ends
She decided to retire when her daytime volunteering started costing her sleep.
“It is taking a toll,” she said.
“I bring it home with me, and I just can’t stop thinking about how I can find help for these people at other places.”
Recent examples of her plight to help people include a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder and a deaf man who lost his job when his company moved and he was ineligible for unemployment because he could have gone to where the company moved.
“She’s done this religiously all these years and last June gave me her ‘notice’ that her last day will be the end of December,” Rita Houston, co-director of community support services for OlyCAP, wrote in an e-mail about Barnard.
“She’s our rock — [our] go-to person and has come in many, many times to cover appointments when staff call in sick.
“She even drove in on our snow day when all other staff stayed home,” Houston wrote.
“She was worried about the clients.”
Started as a child
Barnard said her volunteering began as a child of the Great Depression.
“I saw what my dad did and what my mother did,” she said.
Her father, Harry Wood, was a dentist who often brought home potatoes for payment.
Her mother, Linnie Wood, also found ways to help out, she said.
“I started when I was just a little thing, and my dad would bring home cigarettes when they were still wrapped in tin foil,” she said.
“We would carefully take that out and make little balls with them [the foil].
“I’m not even sure how it worked, but they did something with them, and it made money for the children’s hospital.”
As an adult, she traveled all over the nation and world — first with her husband, Navy Capt. Alan Barnard, and then, after he died about 52 years ago, as an employee of Pan American World Airways.
Everywhere along the way, she has volunteered — at a hospice, as a mentor, as a tutor. The list goes on and on.
Just because she is retiring for now, Barnard said, she won’t stop altogether.
“I have my eye on a few places,” she said.
To celebrate her work and to commemorate her retirement, OlyCAP will be holding a party and open house Dec. 28 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the office, 228 W. First St., Suite J.
__________
Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
