De Soto High School Social Worker Joe Kordalski has been volunteering with Uplift for 14 years, after finding out about them while working on his college degree.

Uplift is a homeless outreach program, powered completely by volunteers.

“They [Uplifts building] had gotten broken into and the news was talking about what was stolen and what the community could do to support,” Kordalski said. “I was intrigued about what they did, so I got involved and started showing up once a week and it grew from there.”

There are three main volunteer sessions Uplift offers.

Delivering meals is one of the three, in which clothes, meals and other necessities are handed out via truck route.

“We will show up between 4:00 and 4:30 to get the trucks prepped and give the volunteers an update on what the night will look like… We leave the shop around 6:00,” Kordalski said.  “Depending on the weather and the time of the year we may get back at nine or as late as ten thirty. That entire time we are going from place to place meeting with groups of homeless individuals.  And then when we get back we do a breakdown of the trucks and start to set up for the next night they go out.”

Current President of Uplift Organization, Kathy Dean, stresses the importance of volunteers and the things they do.

“The importance of volunteers is that we will feed over 21,000 people this year and that takes a lot of work.  Without our volunteer’s we would not be able to accomplish this,” Dean said. “We do it because every life is valuable.”

Some volunteers find that through volunteering, they are not just helping to change others lives but changing their own as well.

“It’s given me a daily reminder of how grateful and fortunate I am to have a job and for me to be able to provide for my family. It’s nice because it helps keep things in perspective for me, and it’s a neat opportunity for me to meet people I wouldn’t normally meet in my daily life,” Kordalski said.

Fellow Uplift volunteer Margie Burton agrees.

“I always learn something from them, and what I learn is people who have the least are usually the ones who will share the most,” Burton said.

Throughout the years, Uplift has changed many homeless people’s lives through their hard work, time, and dedication.

“Our mission is to provide care and compassion to homeless and provide just the very basic extension of life, to let someone know that they matter is huge. A lot of the people we serve, for a variety of reasons, don’t seek traditional services like shelters or case management for mental health, so just letting someone know that we are thinking about them, that we’re there to give them the basics is just a really neat gesture,” said Kordalski.

Burton has seen and heard about Kordalski’s work for Uplift and believes that he has a special passion to help others.

“He goes out of his way to make sure he gets as much stuff as he can for the homeless people. He has a passion to help people, especially people who are living on the streets,” Burton said.

Uplift encourages people to join the cause and help out the community by volunteering, an opportunity for students to take a part in as well.