By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Some Wood County families are sleeping better at night thanks to a community effort that recently delivered 20 new beds.
Crista Metzger-Leady, a family coach for Mercy Health, spends a lot of time listening to families in need and helping connect them to necessary resources in the community.
One of the first families she worked with had been on a waiting list for a bigger apartment for three years. When the mother and her children were finally ready to move, the local nonprofit Let’s Build Beds provided twin beds for her younger children. However, her 10-year-old son was too big for the twin-sized beds the organization provides.
Metzger-Leady discovered there is a significant gap when it comes to providing adult-sized beds for families in need.
“I looked for resources for bigger beds for him and also for another mom who was sleeping on a couch,” she said. “But there are no programs for adult-sized beds, unless you are an adult with a documented disability, then there is a program for that.”
She heard a tip about a person in Lucas County who had been successful getting adult beds by reaching out directly to mattress companies.
With suggestions of who and what to write, Metzger-Leady decided to try. “The worst they can say is no, and I’m no further behind than when I started,” she said. “I wrote a letter to Temper-Sealy in May, essentially begging them to donate some beds or to point me in the right direction. I was fully expecting a ‘no.’”
Months passed, and she figured that when she hadn’t heard anything by September, it wasn’t going to happen.
Out of the blue, in early November, Metzger-Leady got her answer—20 king- and queen-sized beds would be donated for the local families in need. The mattresses were delivered to the Wood County Board of Developmental Disabilities on Nov. 10.
The donated mattresses were a true godsend, she said, but admitted the donation also created a few logistical nightmares. Many of the families on her list didn’t have a pickup truck or a car, “because transportation is a barrier with a lot of my families,” she said.
“I had to figure out how I was going to deliver the mattresses to the families that couldn’t pick them up,” she said. “I was venting to a friend, ‘How am I going to do this? I’m going to have to borrow my dad’s tractor-trailer.’ I had a million plans.”
The friend had a friend who works for the Perrysburg Penske Truck Rental. She connected her with the coordinator, “who gave me a truck for free,” Metzger-Leady said. “They covered the insurance; I just had to put gas in it.”
The next obstacle came when she put out a call for “strong people” to help her with the deliveries to 10 families. “I put it on social media and didn’t get any volunteers,” she said. “I just decided I could do it myself.”
She showed up at the WCBDD with the donated truck. “The maintenance department was so kind and unloaded everything.”
When Melissa Coe, the director of WCBDD’s Family and Children First Council, heard that Metzger-Leady was planning to handle the deliveries, Coe dropped everything to help.
“What other county could you find an FCFC director that would be like, ‘I’ll help you move mattresses into strangers’ homes today. And that’s exactly what she did,” Metzger-Leady said about Coe’s willingness to help. “Wood County has a unique and powerful sense of community, where people and organizations readily collaborate to solve problems.”
She called it “a full circle moment” to have a community come together to successfully deliver beds to families she knew were in need, including one family whose case she had kept in mind even though she had closed the case a year ago.
“I’m one person who wrote an email and then asked the right people if they wanted to be part of this thing, and a whole village came together,” she said about how her single action snowballed into a successful communitywide effort.
“It feels like a lot of luck and little blessings of knowing the right people that all just kind of squished together. And it was a good day.”
