Think “Patch Adams” meets “Benji” in “This Old House” on “Avatar”
Everywhere you look in life, something – or someone – is needing TLC. At Tend and Mend Foundation, we turn your donations into opportunities for tending everything and everyone that needs mending – everywhere we possibly can. Your donations purchase old houses that our Board of Directors set up with alternative care practitioners as staff. We then attract community volunteers who give of their talents such as carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work. While we begin holding community gatherings and offering holistic treatments and drawing in the disadvantaged from every walk of life.
Through staff and volunteers working together to fix these houses, they become homes to everyone who is a part of our project. Staff and community volunteers bring their expertise and engage the help of the downtrodden, who then begin to open up and offer themselves and their skills and talents to our collective mission. It all unfolds slowly and steadily, as everyone feels more trusting (and trusted) within our empowering community that provides ongoing organic support. And so all those who have been forgotten or neglected begin tending a forgotten or neglected property. The mending that happens as we all join together in this common goal is extraordinary.
Sure, there are crumbling walls. And a veteran with PTSD who’s sleeping the best he has in years since trying his hand at plastering. Of course, there’s a broken window or two. And a junkie fresh out of rehab who’s looking to glaze some glass instead of use again. There’s cracked tile and peeling paint – and tile specialists and painters guiding us all as we grunt and grumble and get it wrong before we ever get it right.
And then there’s the mutt with a tattered ear who cowers at loud voices and thunder. It’s safe to say she stole our hearts and bonded us really quickly as a real family. At a Tend and Mend House, the “fur children” play a huge role in making us all feel connected; we take turns with walks and meals and playtime while wrestling with everything from sheet rock and shingles to our very souls’ darkest nights.
Please excuse our leaky pipes and creaky floors and squeaky doors. And remember we are tending to forgotten properties and frayed people and forlorn strays who have been vandalized and violated and victimized in any number of ways.
Those of us on the front porches and the front lines at our Tend and Mend Houses are licensed healthcare workers with big hearts. And even bigger ideals. Committed without question to the idea that there are no throwaways. None too bad or too lost or too late or too far gone. We provide a stable and solid foundation built on energetic and Chinese medicine principles. Guiding truths that teach how all disharmony comes from within, from a place of truly not feeling worthy. Of not feeling good enough to be a part of something good … something bigger than the self. Something that feels like home.
Yet at Tend and Mend Foundation, everyone is a part of our family. Every wet nose and wild child and weary loner quickly learns our door is always open. Give us a call and let us welcome you into the fold, too: 833-TEND2ME (833-836-3263).
