Warm Hearts, Warm Homes

This appeared Dec. 17, 2006

The weather almanac that I check on-line every morning says it has been a mild winter, and you probably don‘t need me to tell you that.

Temperatures are hovering around spring levels, people are wearing shorts to the mall for Christmas shopping, and not a trace of snow has been spotted on even the highest peaks hereabouts.

But there are those of us in Chester County for whom the current mild weather offers little consolation. It still gets cold at night, and April is still far in the future. If you look very hard, you will find people who go through the winter without any heat in their homes. Many elderly people, many not, make choices every November that you and I do not ever consider: Should I cut back on groceries, or turn off the heat?

That‘s right. Not everyone in Chester County is wealthy enough to enjoy a McMansion in DevelopmentLand with a 72-degree heated living room. Go off the main road in towns from Malvern to Marshallton and you will find folks who can‘t keep pace with the rising costs of things like food and fuel.

That is where the creatively charitable folks at United Way of Chester County enter the picture.

Teaming up with equally large-hearted workers at the Housing Partnership of Chester County and Good Works, United Way last year started a comfy little program called Share the Warmth.

In addition to all the other work that United Way takes on to better the quality of life in the county, last winter the agency raised money to help keep people from being cold in their homes.

It sounds simple, and really it is; there aren‘t any socio-political issues here to grapple over — just install a new furnace or winterize some windows and somebody‘s life takes a step forward.

United Way started with $150,000 and turned that into $165,000 with the help of National Penn Bank, the Concerned Citizens of Chester County, Siemens, and QVC. (Imagine: Buying another set of Diamonique earrings may actually be a good thing! Ain‘t life grand?) Then they found 41 families who needed help keeping warm.

The people who got the help have real problems, not imagined.

Kevin, for example, has multiple sclerosis and can‘t work, but he‘s got four children and wants to maintain the home his mother and father lived in. Share the Warmth made sure he got a new roof and a tank of oil. James is an 83-year-old widower who went cold for two years for fear of burdening his family. He got a new heater.

In the end it looked like this: 22 roofs repaired, 16 windows winterized, 12 tanks of fuel oil delivered, 12 heaters replaced, 6 sets of insulation installed, and five doors installed. They probably would have thrown in a partridge in a pear tree, too, but partridges don‘t come cheap around these parts.

So you might want to give the folks at United Way a call at 610-429-9400 and ask how you could contribute to Share the Warmth. They‘re trying to up the ante this year to help even more families stay warm.

And that, in a word, is cool.