Hiking, golf, gardening, Netflix? What’s your idea of fun? For Jericho Road Pasadena co-founder John Blue, it’s doing something constructive for the community. “I’m very serious. It is fun when I’ve done something useful and that will provide the fun,” he explains.
The now retired attorney has always stepped up to do his part in various volunteer projects for the community, but he admits he was frustrated. He felt he didn’t have any particular skills for many of the tasks at hand, while at the same time, he had skills that weren’t being tapped. He knew he wasn’t the only one.
That’s why the Jericho Road model of matching skilled volunteers to nonprofits first got his attention when he heard about it at a Unitarian Universalist Church General Assembly meeting in 2005. Months later, when then Neighborhood Church minister Hannah Petrie mentioned starting the project in Pasadena, he was ready.
“The thing that attracted me to the Jericho Road model was that it took a skill a parishioner had and figured out a way to amplify that skill for a much larger group of people,” Blue explains. “I thought that would attract people who had a salable skill, lawyers, web developers, graphic designers, and that sort of thing.”
Developing Jericho Road in Pasadena was the volunteer challenge he was looking for, since it gave him a chance to use his unique skills for the good of the community. He stepped up and led the effort to get it going. He formed a committee to raise seed money for the project, to put together its organizational structure and to hire a part-time Executive Director in 2010.
He points with pride to Jericho Road Pasadena‘s success. After eight years, it has a full-time Executive Director, and a part-time Program Coordinator to handle the demand for matching volunteers with nonprofits that need their skills to grow and serve the community. It also offers training for prospective nonprofit board members and matches them with local organizations. According to Blue, “It provides to the community that sort of thing that local organizations would have a hard time finding.”
Blue notes the work he put in to start Jericho Road Pasadena isn’t particularly glamorous. “You’re not going to get a lot of rah-rah out of it. The satisfaction is over a period of time you can see the good that takes place and you can say I’m happy. “ Although he admits Jericho Road Pasadena probably wouldn’t have taken root without his fundraising and organizational development skills, what makes him happiest is what the organization has accomplished so far. “What gives me the most satisfaction is to see the thousands of dollars’ worth of projects we have done… that make something useful happen for the city, and the community of Pasadena and environment.”
Thank you to JRP volunteer Liz McHale for writing this article! Liz is a retired news writer and producer who loves volunteering, including a stint in the Peace Corps, and traveling in retirement.