Every Saturday morning, a group of dedicated volunteers meets outside a garage on the campus of St. Mary of Vernon Parish in Indian Creek to take part in the Sharing Hands Furniture Ministry that collects donated furniture and delivers it to people in need.

Parishioners have been doing this every Saturday for 30 years.

During the week, Deacon Jim Wogan, who started the program, and volunteers load up five box trucks and one pickup truck with furniture to be delivered so they are ready to go on Saturday morning at 9 a.m.

The furniture ministry is part of the parish’s Sharing Hands Ministry that includes the weekly food pantry

At first, the ministry was a bunch of men from the parish who wanted to help out any widows who needed help around the house or mowing the lawn. Wogan recruited a group of men and advertised at the parish, but didn’t receive any responses.

Then one day someone asked the pastor if they knew of someone who could provide them a crib.

“We mentioned it from the pulpit and the next thing you know, furniture started flowing in,” said Wogan.

Each week, people who have furniture to donate contact the parish and Wogan creates a list and a plan for pickup. He tries to coordinate pickups with deliveries that go all over Lake County.

“It’s spread by word of mouth that people know about us,” Wogan said. “We don’t advertise. It’s been 30 years. A lot of people have seen our trucks in someone’s driveway and call their neighbor and found out about it.”

Every weekend they have about nine furniture pickups, Wogan said.

However, they can’t take everything. For example, they don’t accepts desks because their clients are living in small apartments and don’t have much room. They also don’t take furniture in poor condition or large furniture like China cabinets or entertainment consoles.

New or clean beds are the most important thing people can donate, Wogan said.

“In an ideal situation, when somebody calls to donate I already have somebody on my list that needs that stuff so we then pick it up and deliver it to the person and we never have to worry about storage,” he said. “However, matching up donations with needs is not always as neat as that.”

Those who need the furniture are clients of the parish food pantry, which is open on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings, and come through case workers at Catholic Charities and the local PADS program.

Clients at the Saturday food pantry often will walk over to the garage while they are waiting for their food and pick up some furniture.

And Wogan is always looking for new, younger people to volunteer.

“I’ve got some fabulous volunteers, but we are getting old,” he said. “We are way older than we need to be for moving furniture, but they keep plugging.”

Helping newly housed people find furniture is gratifying for Wogan.

“As you can imagine, sometimes people who are homeless have been in an apartment for two or three weeks before we were able to get to them — just because there were other people in line — and you get there and you know that they’ve been sleeping on the floor and they have nothing else,” he said. “You’re where the rubber meets the road. You’re actually interfacing with the people you’re helping and you see just a lot of gratitude.”

Bruce Kwiecinski has been volunteering for 25 years and serves as Wogan’s “right arm.”

“It’s one of those ministries that is outside the walls [of the church] and when you deliver furniture to people you can actually see how you’re helping,” he said. “It’s just fulfilling that way.”

Kwiecinski worked as a special education teacher for Chicago Public Schools for 35 years and has a heart for the families with children that they deliver to, he said.

“The most rewarding is when you’re bringing beds and things for little kids who are sleeping on the floor on a sleeping bag or something and they just light up because they have a bed to sleep on,” he said.