Volunteer Stories

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Bishop Brossart High School

Bishop Brossart High School of Alexandria has something for its students who want to give back to the Northern Kentucky community.  Donna Heim and Suzette Glaab coordinate student volunteer opportunities with  HONK on a monthly basis.  The students help out with a variety of projects from painting, cleaning out crawl spaces, tearing down walls to general cleanup of current projects.

 

 

“Getting involved with HONK makes the students feel good about themselves and the community. It makes them feel more a part of the community,” Brossart teacher, Suzette Glaab said. Suzette Glaab heads Brossarts’ Beta Club, a national organization dedicated
to service, leadership and academic achievement.  One Saturday a month she schedules 8 to 10 student members of the Beta Club as HONK volunteers.

 

Donna Heim coordinates volunteer efforts at Brossart for the Freshman, Sophomore and Junior classes.   Once a year each class participates in some volunteering activity with HONK. “HONK is an important cause, because it serves families and children in need,” Brossart teacher, Donna Heim said. “It teaches our kids to give back to the community they’re a part of, and hopefully encourages them to do more.”

 

According to Glaab, “The kids love volunteering for HONK and say it’s a blast, especially when it involves tearing something down.  The kids talk about their effort in cleaning out a clogged crawl space and painting a basement wall and putting their handprints on it. “

Bishop Brossart is a long-time HONK Community Partner and has provided volunteers for over 15 years. Thank you Bishop Brossart!

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Hank Boehmer

Church and school groups make up a large portion of the volunteers that work on homes for HONK, but Hank Boehmer is proof that individuals can truly make a difference.

Boehmer was looking to remain active after retiring from his paint business in Covington when he first came to HONK in the early 1990’s.

“Some retirees like myself had heard about the HONK program” he added, “we volunteered for the first time years ago and have been busy ever since.”

In the 20+ years that he spent volunteering for HONK, Boehmer estimated he may had worked on close to 100 homes, mostly renovations in the Covington area. In addition to applying his skills from his days in the paint business, volunteering enabled Boehmer to pick up a variety of new skills.

“I’ve become more versatile in terms of carpentry and drywall and some guys get into plumbing too.” He said, “sometimes we teach others and sometimes they teach us.”

Volunteering at HONK also allowed Boehmer to meet new people and make new friends. He and Bart Braden, a retired math professor from Northern Kentucky University, hit it off shortly after they began volunteering together. “We partnered up one day and now we always try to schedule the same days together” Boehmer said.

Boehmer often expressed that his volunteer work with HONK allowed him to share the good fortune that he had in his life with others.

“For me, I’ve been very blessed in my life. I love to try to improve on things. You can take an older home and restore it and take a person who is struggling and offer a better living condition. It is a spiritual thing.”

Hank Boehmer, passed away in the summer of 2021.

Boehmer volunteered at HONK two-to-three days a week for over two decades. Anyone who spent a day or two working alongside Hank Boehmer would come away learning something new.  We were all blessed to have known him. And we are grateful to his wife and family for sharing him with us all these years. He was humble, a true man of God and an inspiration to us all.

In 2021, the HONK workshop was dedicated to Hank Boehmer and named after him in his honor.