GLEANING FOR JESUS BY MIKE AND DENISE THOMPSON
Those who experience a Leslie Bacon makeover learn that Jesus wants to rescue them, too, from the curbside of life. PRISM 2 0 1 0
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How many families has Gleaning for Jesus supported over the course of two decades? Leslie Bacon is not into keeping statistical records, but she has provided intensive counseling to several hundred young moms, and has arranged to provide household items for thousands more families.
GLEANING GETS GOING Established in 1990, Gleaning for Jesus gets its name from the biblical provision for the poor to collect grain overlooked during the first pass of the harvest. In Bacon’s case, the crop is household castoffs. Many of her clients have no idea she’s a certified, licensed social worker, and in fact she prefers that a young mom view her simply as a helping friend in jeans and a sweatshirt who is dragging a mattress through the door. “I know I’m not your typical social worker, but these young ladies don’t want to be downgraded or feel they’re being judged,” Bacon explains. Their challenges may range from budgeting to parenting to drug abuse. “We need other ways to reach them,” Bacon says. “I grew up in Saginaw’s projects with no pictures on the walls, no carpeting, just a cold concrete floor. This contributed to a negative view that I carried all the way into my young adult years. When we do a makeover and transform a house into a true home — a true home like I never had—it affects someone’s whole outlook.” Retiree George Barrett, a long-time Gleaning for Jesus volunteer and donor, remains fascinated. He’s a self-described “pack rat” who got involved after he donated two truckloads of items from the basement and garage of his suburban home. Now he serves on Gleaning for Jesus’ board of directors. “Leslie’s approach is ingenious,” says Barrett. “She takes these items and uses them as part of her counseling, but to the people on the receiving end, it doesn’t seem like counseling at first. It’s Leslie’s way of opening the door for their trust.”
Leslie Bacon’s day job with Saginaw County social services blends seamlessly with her work with Gleaning for Jesus.
Leslie Bacon is a curbside scrap collector. A furniture and appliance repair specialist. An interior decorator. A professional social worker. And, ultimately, an evangelist. Bacon is the founder of Gleaning for Jesus, an original outreach project to uplift troubled young single mothers in Saginaw, Mich., a struggling auto town north of Detroit. Sometimes she drives around town, spying discarded appliances and furniture along trash disposal routes. Sometimes she answers calls from folks who want to contribute used household items. She gathers her 5-foot-2-inch, 125-pound frame and loads these recycled treasures onto an old truck. “People think I’m a junk lady,” says Bacon, a youthful 59, with a modest laugh. But like many of the church’s greatest saints, Bacon possesses a clear evangelical strategy. Once she has repaired her rescued treasures to clean and working order, Bacon heads for a single mother’s apartment, where the two work as a team to perform a top-to-bottom makeover — from the living room couch and the laundry room washing machine to pictures on the walls, vases on the end tables, and toys for the kids. The children assist if they’re old enough. Bacon gains the trust of her clients in a manner that a more traditional social worker or counselor would not. Having inspired a new homemaker, she offers encouragement, hugs, and prayers. Annie, a 20-year-old mother of two who has just experienced a Bacon makeover, is overjoyed with her apartment’s fresh furnishings but shyly affirms, “Miss Bacon has helped me learn to love my kids more,” unwittingly summing up Bacon’s mission through Gleaning for Jesus. Meanwhile, 23-year-old Marie has been entrusting Bacon with the monthly food stamps for her three-child home. This month, however, she has reverted to old form and sold the vouchers for money to buy crack cocaine. Bacon is disappointed, but instead of delivering a lecture, she holds the young mother’s hand for a quiet prayer.
RED CROSS STARTUP Bacon was in her late 30s, divorced with three grown children, when she became aware of a spiritual void in her life, a sense of untapped potential. She reflected upon her great-grandmother and her grandmother, who had been social workers in small-town Indiana during the Great Depression and after World War II. Deciding to follow in their footsteps, she enrolled at Saginaw Valley State University in the School of Social Work. Many of her classmates were half her age. Her college field work assignment in 1990 was with the Saginaw Red Cross, which is the first responder when fires cause families to become homeless. With her previous experience working in a neighborhood furniture and appliance
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casework assistant and a pair of part-time collection drivers. A company contributed its former warehouse, and a construction company donated materials and labor to renovate it. Bacon was so happy with the warehouse that she stood inside one day, punching a button over and over just to see the door at the loading dock open and close. “My faith becomes stronger because of the timing of what has happened,” Bacon says. “Each time that the outlook seems bleak, that is when people come through for me. Can you imagine a family-owned business donating its entire building or a roofing company contributing a job worth $30,000?” She now has enough space to conduct classes on everything from parenting to sewing. People contribute not only furniture and appliances but also school books and other learning materials. She collects and fixes toys for a yearly Christmas giveaway. In a truly unique step, Bacon has also used donated items to convert the building’s former customer service area into a chapel, organizing “gleaned weddings” for couples who otherwise could afford nothing more than an oath before the county magistrate. Fifteen chairs are decorated with ribbons that a newlywed couple had planned to throw away. She even keeps donated bridal dresses and an arbor on hand, and somebody even donated a church organ. “If anything is the total embodiment of Gleaning for Jesus, it’s those weddings,” Leslie Bacon says. “This is more than just picking up stuff off the curb. There’s a motive behind this. And there are results.” N
repair shop, she suddenly found herself with clients who had lost all their possessions. The formula clicked in her spirit: repaired household items + social work outreach + evangelism = Gleaning for Jesus. She named her old blue van “Ruth” in tribute to the biblical heroine known for gleaning. Her first efforts for her Red Cross clients were at a true scavenger level, scouring Saginaw’s curbsides on her own after-hours volunteer time. A sofa might be collapsed and seem worthless, for example, but she would use the undamaged vinyl to cover the seats of a set of beatup kitchen chairs. “She would be driving along and say, ‘Ooo, ooo, there’s a nice chair. Ooo, ooo, there’s a good table,’” recalls her brother Gordon Mark Butler, mimicking her excited reactions. “She would always stop and pick things up, even on Sundays in our church clothes.” Bacon soon won support from an unexpected source. Environmental activists, mostly from the suburbs, looked at her inner-city efforts as a form of recycling. Each item she gleaned from a street curb, after all, was saved from a landfill. She smiles as she recalls how she learned that “gleaning” was also “greening.” In 1991, Bacon landed her current paid position — social work with single-parent families — through the Saginaw County Youth Protection Council. Her supervisors were so impressed that they incorporated her gleaning efforts into a project entitled “House to Home.” Gleaning for Jesus grew so quickly that Bacon eventually became more selective. She now works mostly with “as-is” items that are donated directly, rather than snatched from street curbs. “But I’ll still stop,” she says. “The other day, I saw a pair of end tables that I just had to grab. I still have the strength, although now with arthritis it’s harder to get a grip.” But it’s always worth the trouble. She recently donated a kitchen table to an apartment where a 4-year-old boy was eating on the floor. “He grabbed the leg of that table, and he hugged it like a new toy,” she says.
Mike Thompson is a semiretired news reporter who worked for 33 years at The Saginaw (Mich.) News. Denise Thompson is a freelance journalist.
Mike Thompson
SAGINAW COMES THROUGH Bacon faced a streak of hard luck during the late 1990s. A fire destroyed a former shipping depot where she was storing her goods. Then her trucks coughed and quit, one after another. She stalled at a busy intersection on a hot summer day, blocking traffic. She stood in the street and attempted to direct drivers around her stalled vehicle. Some motorists responded by honking at her and cursing her. At that moment she considered quitting. Then an array of sources came to the rescue. She received funds for truck repairs. She reaped an annual grant for a
The Gleaning for Jesus wedding chapel, decorated exclusively with cast-offs, has already hosted three weddings.
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