RSVP-Lead With Experience Award: Karleen Suhrbier

The green shamrocks on Karleen Suhrbier’s necklace flash on and off as she helps fill Easter baskets with bright confetti, candy, and toys, working among the many rows of senior volunteers at the Hanover Township Senior Center. According to the center’s volunteer coordinator, Suzanne Powers, Suhrbier is to thank for the high amount of senior volunteers at the center. For several months the volunteer program had no dedicated staff person to manage it, and seeing the need, she stepped forward to keep it running.
 
“Without Karleen I think the volunteer program would have fallen apart,” Powers said.
 
As an RSVP volunteer, Suhrbier utilized her professional background and her own extensive experience with the volunteer program to develop systems and resources that assisted the staff with tracking and managing their volunteers. She said she thought saving the program was important because the efforts of seniors, from driving for meals on wheels to making plastic mats for the homeless, have made a big impact on the community.
 
“Everyone can do something,” she said. “And I really think most of the people in the area have been touched one way or another through the senior center and our volunteer programs,” she said.
 
In addition to assisting with the program, Powers said Suhrbier’s dedication to the center and to volunteering makes a tremendous impact on those around her. Even when she began difficult chemotheraphy sessions, Suhrbier tried to never miss an event at the center “as a rule.”
 
“If you sit home and do nothing else but watch TV your life is gone; but if you’re here trying to help do something, you touch a lot of people,” Suhrbier said.
 
Suhrbier turned that difficult experience into a way to help others, organizing the efforts of the Knit and Crochet Club to make hats and lap blankets for people enduring chemotheraphy. She said the handmade gifts make a big impact.
 
“When you’re feeling really down, to have something bright and colorful delivered to your room for no reason really brightens up your day,” she said.