When Rick DeBord was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the housing project he was working on in Wheelersburg went unfinished – until members of The Counseling Center’s Promises Team showed up ready to lend a helping hand.

“The Promises Team evolved as a way for our clients to make restitution,” Robin Stanley, of The Counseling Center, said. “Sometimes people will say they don’t owe them a thing; just go on with your life and don’t use drugs or alcohol anymore, but I still need to make amends whether or not the person I need to make amends to wants it or not.”

She said when times such as that occur, the Promises Team finds ways for clients to make amends to society.

The Promises Team was named after the ninth step of the traditional 12-Step recovery program.

“The ninth step is the amends list. There’s a set of promises that begin to come true for us — and I say ‘us’ because I’m in recovery as well,” Stanley said.

Working together, the Promises Team has volunteered their time and skills to projects all around Scioto County; even helping build wheelchair ramps for developmentally disabled children in our county, with supplies donated by Scioto County DD Board. The team also works with Main Street Portsmouth, and has community meals, fishing trips and Easter Egg hunts. Volunteers also work at HopeWorks screen printing and embroidery shop, on Fourth Street in Portsmouth.

“We try to find all different kinds of acts of kindness that our volunteers can do,” Beth Perry, of the Counseling Center, said.

So when DeBord’s daughter called the team at The Counseling Center to share her father’s story, more than a dozen volunteers showed up to help finish his house in Wheelersburg.

After the team completed the project, Diane DeBord sent a heartfelt letter of thanks for her husband.

“Due to his illness and traveling back and forth to Cincinnati for chemo and doctor’s visits, we could not seem to get our house completed,” DeBord wrote. “With the help of the young men we were able to complete the plumbing, electricity, and dry wall; this helped in finally being able to move my husband into his new home, where he wanted to be and worked hard in doing till he couldn’t anymore.”

Letters such as her’s show Promises Team volunteers just how much of a positive impact they can have on our community.

Perry said volunteers working with the Promises Team gain a genuine sense of pride from giving back to their community and helping people in need. She said it helps put their own problems in perspective when helping someone who may have it much worse than themselves. Stanley remembers when a team built a ramp for a gentleman in New Boston, and the look on the faces of those volunteers when they were done.

“Those guys were walking on air when they came back. They felt so grateful and honored to be given that kind of a task. That particular gentleman was so excited because he was able to leave his house for the first time in months, and he was going to Wal-Mart,” Stanley said.

Volunteers were struck by how even the simplest things many of us take for granted can mean so much to someone else.

“We are always looking for ways that we can volunteer in the community, or help someone in need,” Perry said.

RYAN SCOTT OTTNEY can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 235, or e-mail rottney@heartlandpublications.com.