Got lumber?

Future site of Alpine's tool shed.

Curtis and Loren Bowman are brothers. They have lived in the Monroe/Alpine community for many years. Loren began managing the Monroe Food Bank as a volunteer almost fifteen years ago and developed it into the thriving service it is today. When he started, the Food Bank was giving food-boxes once a month to about three families. Now it serves about ten times that amount on a weekly basis. Because of the recession, the numbers of people served by this local effort continues to grow. A year or so ago, Loren stepped back from being the manager of the program and passed on the job to his brother Curtis. These are two humble and hard-working servants in our community. Just last week Loren made a donation to help the "Sharing Gardens", he donated a whole bunch of used decking material that we can use to build a tool shed at the Alpine Garden site.

Add this to the lumber already donated by Tibby and John Scott and we have more than half of what we need to build the shed. After a few hours pulling nails this weekend we ended up with a good-looking stack of lumber.

Our current lumber stash at Alpine Park

Thanks to Trust Management Services and the generous grant they just awarded us (more on this in a future blog-post) we now are well-funded through this coming year. In an effort to stretch these funds as far as they will go, we would still like to encourage everyone to contribute their "excess" materials to the project. If any of you readers have a stack of used, or new 2 x 4's that you don't see a need for, we'd be grateful to take them off your hands and put them to good use. Once we have the tool shed built in the Alpine Park we can open up the cinder-block bathroom (where we've been storing tools) for public use again.