Bed-supplying ‘Brigade’ expands to fill growing need
Tucking in sheets and pulling up covers, Jaden Atkinson made his bed with an enthusiasm rarely detectable in a 13-year-old.
His exuberance stemmed from his sleeping accommodations the previous several nights: He’d been sharing a full-size bed with younger brother Alijah Eichenlaub, 9, in their grandmother’s Southeast Side home.
Along with their 8-year-old sister, Adriana Marshal, who slept on a couch, the children survived the makeshift
arrangements as best they could after hastily moving in with Kathy Courtright.
Courtright had filed for emergency custody of her grandkids because her daughter, she said, “is on a bad path in life.”
After paying court costs and making sure that the children had school clothes and food, she had no money left for two more beds.
“It has been a nightmare,” said Courtright, prompting agreement from Jaden.
“Yeah, especially because my little brother, he kicks,” the teen said.
On a recent weekday, the bed problem was solved when Dale Cory dropped off two wooden frames, mattresses, pillows and bed linens.
The delivery was free, courtesy of the Bed Brigade, a ministry that makes and delivers beds to people in need. The group operates out of six central Ohio churches, including Cory’s: Upper Arlington Lutheran.
“It’s a great thing,” Courtright said as she watched Cory, Jaden and Adriana (Alijah wasn’t home) set up the beds in a small basement room.
“I’m so thankful and appreciative. I really needed it.”
Ron VanHorn, pastor of the Vineyard church in Circleville, and his wife, Tracy, started the Bed Brigade in 2010. For several years, the charity was run by a small group of people, even as the need grew to a five-county area.
In 2012, after seeing a TV story about the ministry, Cory, a Grove City resident, decided to help out.
“I was getting into retirement age and looking for extra things to do,” said Cory, 63, who with his wife, Bev, has two grown daughters. “I like working with my hands, so building beds looked like something that would be nice.”
He started out helping in Circleville, but in 2013 he and members of two other central Ohio churches (St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran in Grove City and Karl Road Baptist) started Bed Brigade groups of their own.
Since then, chapters have been introduced at churches in Chillicothe (First Wesleyan) and Lancaster (Crossroads).
“It’s great,” Ron VanHorn said of the group’s growth. “It’s what we hoped for.”
Cory estimates that the six churches combined will deliver at least 1,000 beds this year.
“Everybody takes a bed for granted, but I can’t tell you how many houses I have walked out of where the beds we delivered were the only furniture they had in the house,” Cory said.
“We have delivered to people who were homeless and just moved into a house, or to people who had a bedbug problem, and the only thing you can do is throw the bed away and get out of that place.”
Each church largely operates independently, lining up funding (most, but not all, receive money from their respective churches) and organizing volunteers to help build beds and purchase linens.
Cory has become the selfdescribed “mattress czar” in charge of reaching out to area universities and collecting their old mattresses (but always clean, he said).
He also has involved outside groups to help construct the beds.
Cory met Bruce Green about a year ago while volunteering at a Columbus food pantry. After learning that Green worked as the community relations and service coordinator at Africentric Early College K-12, Cory visited the school several times, tapping the students for help in putting bed frames together.
“Dale is just so good with the kids, so patient,” Green said. “The middle- and high-school kids could use the drills, but he had the younger kids painting hearts and smiley faces on the boards.
“The kids came out thinking they had saved the world by making beds.”
On every frame that Cory makes, he stencils, “Jesus loves you.”
All Bed Brigade deliveries also include Bibles (Cory had age-appropriate ones for each child in the Courtright house), and, before they leave, the volunteers ask to say a quick prayer with the recipients.
“When you see how much you have blessed these people, how excited they are to get something as simple as a bed, it touches you,” Cory said.
“It just makes your day.”
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“Everybody takes a bed for granted, but I can’t tell you how many houses I have walked out of where the beds we delivered were the only furniture they had in the house.”
— Bed Brigade volunteer Dale Cory — A haunting coming-of-age story about two previously inseparable girls who are pulled apart as their paths toward adulthood diverge.
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