“It is a special place,” says longtime volunteer Oscar Brown when asked about the Well Community. “I just feel like I leave with more than I came with. … There’s all this positivity and all of this joy.”
For over a decade, Oscar has blessed members of the Well with his generous, welcoming presence and lots of tasty food. And he’s served with a deep sense of the needs of people in the neighborhood living with serious mental illnesses, particularly the need for belonging—an understanding shaped by his youth.
Oscar grew up in a small town in west Texas, and when he was a child, his aunt worked at a residential facility for individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities. That made an impression on his young mind. “It’s almost as if society at the time said, ‘They’re dangerous, they’re unpredictable. We don’t know what to do with them, so let’s put them someplace, let’s lock the doors and let’s not deal with them. … We love them, but we can’t have them around us.’
“I hated that. I couldn’t understand it,” he continues. “I was adopted when I was just a very small child. … I had a family who brought me in, so I couldn’t really understand how somebody could have a child that they would put somewhere.”
So, when he heard about the Well Community, it seemed like a great fit. His church, Kessler Park United Methodist, occasionally engages in “Holy Conversations,” during which, as Oscar explains, “We look around our neighborhood and we say, ‘What needs to be done? What’s missing? What are other churches or groups doing to support the community?’” Through one of these experiences, Oscar learned about the Well, and he decided to give serving there a try.
His impression during his first visit to the Well was, “These are just great people.” As he recalls, “I just was overwhelmed with their gratitude and the joy that they still have in their lives.”
One visit turned into many more, and soon Oscar became a regular and beloved volunteer, using his love of cooking as part of a group from Kessler Park that provides dinner for Thursday Night Life. Then, he visited Jacob’s House, the Well’s group home for men, to donate furniture. “The guys just welcomed me in, and it was just this great atmosphere,” he recalls. “It broke down all of those misconceptions that I grew up with.”
After that, he donated clothing. And then, he started looking for opportunities to go to Jacob’s House. “I knew that when I went over to visit with them that the door was always open.” Several years ago, he also began accompanying Suzan and Phil Sprinkle, also longtime friends of Jacob’s House, in delivering Sunday suppers to the men of the house, taking on full responsibility for the meal when the Sprinkles are traveling. And he often helps to make holidays special. He and Vickie Fisk, also a member of Kessler Park, held a Fourth of July cookout featuring his famously delicious pork loin.
Often accompanying him was his beloved dog, Truman, which he’d rescued as a six-month-old pup in 2009. “The guys loved Truman,” he says, sharing that the men of Jacob’s House would always ask about his canine companion if Truman wasn’t tagging along. When Truman passed away in February of last year, the men all came out on the porch to meet Oscar when he arrived to deliver a meal. “They had a card for me and a plant. … They could tell that I was hurting, and they just had the love and the support that they gave me, understanding the loss that I was going through was overwhelming for me.”
He continues, “It is the definition of family. I mean, that’s what families do. Families support each other, good times and bad times.” And, when Oscar found another dog needing care on the streets of Oak Cliff a few months later and nursed him to health, “I took him by the house, and they all met Kirby and they shared in that joy.”
Oscar recalls how, around that time, one of the men of the house followed him out to his Jeep to talk with him. “He said, ‘You just keep coming over and you continue to bless us, and we don’t have any way to bless you,’” Oscar shares. “And I just stopped cold in my tracks, and I turned around and I was like, ‘You have no idea how much you guys bless me. … When I lost Truman, you guys were there. … You bless me every time I come over here.” As he explained that day, he’s experienced through the bonds he’s formed with the men of Jacob’s House that “we can bless anyone just with our presence.”
This presence is something anyone can offer, and Oscar encourages those thinking about volunteering at the Well Community to give it a try. However, he cautions with a smile, “You go with me one time, and I guarantee you at some point you’re going to be asking me, ‘When can I go again?’” He also emphasizes that there are many opportunities to serve beyond preparing meals, from helping with technology to maintenance tasks at Jacob’s House. “Find your talent and use it.”
He realizes that preconceptions about mental illness may cause apprehension for some potential volunteers. But he encourages them, “Find a way to relate to these individuals and just be there, sit and talk to them.”
Oscar’s mindset “just comes out of awareness: my own personal awareness that things could have been different for me.” He talks openly about being a recovering alcoholic, sharing “things in my life could have been very different than they are today. But by the grace of God and a lot of luck, I was taken out of an environment where I could have very well spiraled at a very young age, and I could have very well been on the streets. … I’ve been so blessed to have the support system there for me when I have fallen throughout the years to pick me up immediately and get me back on track.”
But, he adds, “Some of these guys [at the Well] have not had that. I come from a family that has financial resources and a church that watches over me and always has and always will. And I have that community around me, and I want these guys to have that same opportunity to thrive. … I’m full of gratitude and recognition that I was given an opportunity. … Anything I can do to share that opportunity with these guys, I’ll do it.”
Oscar explains that society often wants to put people like members of the Well in boxes to make it easier to keep them at arm’s length, and as a result, “sometimes they question their worthiness.” He speaks of the importance of volunteers coming around them to “build these folks up … make them feel a part of life and show them that they’re worthy.” And that, he says, involves “just seeing these guys for who they are, all of them. … We can just look in somebody’s eyes and feel their soul and know that they’re a child of God. That’s what this is all about.”
The Well Community offers a wide variety of opportunities to volunteer! Click here to learn how you could get involved.