In honor of our fallen 19 firefighters

My grandfather was a firefighter. My father was a firefighter. I can still picture them in their formal picture, the volunteer firefighters of a small Wisconsin town.

Tonight, it's another group of firefighters in a portrait. The Granite Mountain Hotshots. A much younger group in a less formal picture. They saw a lot more action than my dad and his dad. During fire season in Arizona, they were on the front lines for weeks at a time.

But I'm sure their wives and mothers felt the same way my grandmother did every time that siren went off. She would put on the scanner. We would run down to the station to listen to someone at the radio desk. Hopefully, it was someone burning off weeds that had let their fire get a little too large, rather than someone's home. But worry crossed her face, worry only relieved when they returned home.

Tonight, my husband and I went to a concert. My heart dropped when I saw the news on Facebook: 19 firefighters unaccounted for in Yarnell. Then, moments later, 19 firefighters dead. The news traveled quickly through our section. Then the man next to me got a message and left his seat. When he returned, he had tragic news of his own -- his sister's home was one of 250 structures lost in Yarnell.

Through 15 years on the newspaper staff, fire both frightened me and fascinated me. I had friends on the various fire departments. A big fire was a solid news story. I would listen on the scanner and try to be on scene before the fire departments knocked the flames down. Many times I would return to the office or my house smelling of fire.

My husband never worried. I wasn't in any danger. But we knew plenty of folks who lived it, every time that alarm sounded. With the job came a certain amount of worry for their families.

Tonight 19 families received word that their firefighter isn't coming home. The wind shifted and blew the fire back on top of them, and none of them survived. Other firefighters will come, and soon they will contain it. Condolences are already arriving from the governor, even the president. And as Prescott celebrates its World's Oldest Rodeo and Fourth of July, a sadness will overlay this week.

It will take a long time for Yarnell to recover. The memories of this Hotshot team's tragic end are burned into our community for life.

Not-for-profits carrying too much responsibility

Having worked in a not-for-profit environment for the past 11 years, I know that working there is never quite the same as working in a corporate or business entity. When something at a business breaks, you fix it or replace it. At a not-for-profit or community benefit organization, as my former agency preferred to call itself, there was hand-wringing.

• What will this mean for the budget?
• Can we get it donated instead?
• Would someone donate money to cover the cost of that item?
• Should we buy it now, or wait until the beginning of the month or the next quarter?
• How important is that item, anyway?

That was exactly the feeling I got Friday, when I found out a commercial freezer was out and needed a new compressor. See "Some days you win, some days you do plumbing." Replacing the entire unit was $7,000+ and the compressor was $2,000, so replacing the compressor made sense. However, how badly did we need the freezer? What were the alternatives? How is this going to impact the budget? And most importantly, what did we do with the items that were in the freezer?

Fortunately, none of the food went to waste. But not repairing the freezer immediately was not an option. Our service company knows we run on a shoestring, so we'll get the best deal possible.

Last year, the Coalition for Compassion and Justice's Open Door had over 34,000 individual visits for food and other assistance. We feed people, provide them with clothing, various types of emergency assistance, provide them with a bathroom, a shower, and emergency shelter on the winter's coldest nights. We provide meals and pantry items with donated food, and sometimes buy more food when the shelves get bare. And we debate what else we should do, whether it is our mission, and whether it is critical enough to do if no one else will do it.

We have 15 staff members, including a couple that come to us from Americorps VISTA and AARP on poverty-level wages themselves. And we put lots of volunteers into service -- our count is about 180 at any given moment.

Our goal is to work ourselves out of business: end poverty in this community. But it doesn't look like we'll be out of business anytime soon. Even as the economy begins to recover, our guest count doesn't appear to be tapering off.

Through the past few presidencies, there is a greater emphasis on allowing charities to do this kind of work. Oh, and faith-based initiatives. Just a kind way of saying "The government isn't interested in helping. Find a charity or church to feed the poor and shelter the homeless, care for the mentally ill and provide hope to those in prison (or recently released from prison -- pretty much one in the same. Probationers and parolees don't stand much of a chance of turning their lives around without companies willing to hire them, so they turn to charity or crime).

As soon as one suggests that government should swing the pendulum back in the other direction, you may as well have suggested America becoming a Socialist state. But that isn't true. America came out of the Great Depression on some serious government programs included in the New Deal. Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority are still around. Most of them faded before World War I.

It's time for the government to turn that corner and beef up services and programs that give people a fair shot at economic security. It shouldn't completely rest on nonprofit programs to assure that our communities are fed, housed, treated with health care and mental health services, and gainfully employed. Nonprofits should be filling in the gaps, rather than being the only place for people in crisis to turn.