The instinct with community work is to plan something big once a year. Luke Mickelson’s experience argues almost exactly the opposite.
Anybody Can Get Off The Couch
Mickelson founded Sleep in Heavenly Peace, which builds and delivers beds to children who do not have one. He is unusually insistent that there is nothing special about him:
“I’m a farm kid from Idaho. I’m nobody special. I really am not. And that’s important. I don’t want anybody to have an excuse… that started because some dad in some podunk town of Idaho wanted to teach his kids something and he got up off the couch. You know what? Anybody can do that.”
— Luke Mickelson, Sleep in Heavenly Peace
He is deliberate about refusing the hero framing, and about handing the responsibility back: “my responsibility is not to provide beds for your kids in your community. That’s what your responsibility is. I’m just telling you that there’s a problem and there’s a solution. Now what are you going to do about it?”
Why A Chapter Beats An Annual Event
Mickelson’s model was not to scale one operation. It was to make one repeatable and then teach it:
“They wanted to start a chapter. You know, now. We’ve trained 440 plus chapter presidents in almost every state and in four countries. We’ve built almost 400,000 beds just since 2018.”
— Luke Mickelson
He is equally straightforward about how much is still undone: “there is 160,000 plus kids on our waiting list. And we only cover about 28 % of the United States geographically.”
The transferable insight is that the unit of growth was a repeatable local group, not a bigger central event. His own framing: the thing to do is “teach people the way I did it” and “provide that platform, that opportunity for someone to start a chapter in their area, bring their community together.”
The Five Roles A Small Crew Needs
Our structure rather than Mickelson’s. A crew that keeps running usually has five named people, and naming them is what stops everything landing on one person.
A coordinator who picks the date and the site. Someone on supplies — bags, gloves, grabbers, water. Someone on safety, who does the briefing and knows where the nearest help is. A photographer, because without pictures there is no recruitment. And someone on follow-up, who thanks people and tells them the next date.
None of these is a big job. All of them go undone when they belong to everybody.
Keeping It Going Past The Third Month
The third month is where volunteer groups die, once the novelty is gone and before the habit is formed.
What helps: a fixed slot, such as the first Saturday, so nobody has to decide. A stretch small enough to finish, because finishing is what people come back for. Announcing the next date before the current one ends. And keeping a simple count each time, so the group can see its own record accumulating.
Mickelson’s own explanation for why people stay is worth ending on: “I believe true joy comes when you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about someone else.” He is clear that the problems do not go away — “you still got problems” — only that they look different afterwards.
More at the green energy and community blog.