“This is a gigantic beehive of activity,” says a volunteer proudly as she scurries through the service club’s enormous warehouse and salesroom in the former Sheridan Books facility off Jackson Rd. at 100 N. Staebler.
Mary Buck is the first-ever executive director for the Kiwanis Club of Ann Arbor Foundation. President Steve Hiller says members realized they’d “become too ambitious to rely on volunteer help alone.” | Photo: Mark Bialek
Throughout the 123,000-square-foot building, more than 300 volunteers and club members inspect clothing, repair clocks, check appliances, clean glassware, lug workout equipment, organize mountains of books, display children’s toys, arrange and rearrange furniture, answer questions, and complete sales for lines of customers that rival Black Friday shopping crowds.
Their efforts have produced remarkable results. Between the proceeds from its twice-weekly Kiwanis Thrift Sales and member gifts, the Kiwanis Club of Ann Arbor Foundation brought in a record-breaking $1,341,833 last year—and gave back $1,084,424 to children’s and family agencies and services. Members also delivered nearly 7,000 Meals on Wheels, participated in Mott Children’s Hospital programs, volunteered with the Haiti Nursing Foundation, and supported UNICEF’s efforts to eliminate maternal neonatal tetanus and iodine deficiency disorders around the world. Individual members fund scholarships and supervise Warm the Children, a program providing winter clothing to children in need.
“This year, we recognized that the time had come to hire a full-time director to supervise all this,” says club president Steven Hiller. “Our scope and outreach have become too ambitious to rely on volunteer help alone.”
The chapter mounted a nationwide search that ended when they found Michigan native and MSU graduate Mary Buck in Santa Cruz, where she was managing a seniors-helping-seniors nonprofit called Grey Bears. The 500-member organization runs a thrift center with a staff of forty-eight, two recycling yards, and food delivery services, but Buck and her husband Zach both wanted to be closer to home. “The needs are different here, but the hearts are the same,” she says.
Buck arrived just in time to help the Ann Arbor chapter celebrate its centennial. “With Mary supervising day-to-day operations, life will be easier for the president,” Hiller says gratefully. “She brings a great deal of experience working in this 501(c)(3) environment, and she brings fresh ideas that will help us grow.”
“I’m impressed with the way Kiwanis is using this tremendous facility on behalf of the entire community,” Buck says, offering a tour of the showrooms and workrooms. “This center serves as a polling place; the Red Cross offers blood drives here; Mott Hospital held a retreat here; volunteers donate 1,000 hours of their time here each week; and the extra space is rented to a textbook distribution company. So is a house on the grounds.”
Those revenues helped the center survive the Covid shutdown, Hiller says. For the first nine months of the pandemic, they continued to accept donations, until space ran out. When sales resumed in April 2022, the line of shoppers snaked through the property and all the way out to Jackson Rd. “It was very gratifying,” Hiller says.
“We’re intending to build on that excitement as we serve our donors, customers, and community,” Buck adds. “We’re helping large numbers of people recycle and reuse good-quality items.”
The group that became Kiwanis International was founded in 1915 by a professional organizer, and converted to a nonprofit four years later. In 1924, members adopted six objectives the club has followed ever since: to focus on “the human and spiritual rather than the material values of life;” “encourage daily living of the Golden Rule;” promote “higher social, business, and professional standards;” develop “a more intelligent, aggressive, and serviceable citizenship;” “form enduring friendships … render altruistic service and to build better communities;” and increase “righteousness, justice, patriotism, and good will.”
The Ann Arbor chapter, number 457, was organized in 1921—“Covid postponed our anniversary celebration by two years,” Hiller explains.
Currently, the organization has 175 volunteers and 141 members, whose average age is seventy-five. Hiller, a decade younger, grins that he’s “firmly in the vanguard of the youth movement.” Some of the heavy lifting is now handled by seventeen paid employees, but with about ten members a year moving away or dying, they’re hoping to increase their visibility in the community to attract more people.
Long-range goals include the creation of a Kiwanis Environmental Education Preserve on the property’s seven-plus acres. “What we have built here can expand and go on for generations—we just need leaders,” Hiller says. “Hiring a director like Mary in our centennial year signals our commitment to the future.”
