Harvey Ferdman of Chesterfield is surprisingly calm for a man dealing with officialdom’s glacial response to what everyone agrees is a serious, perhaps imminent threat: a fire under a landfill that is adjacent to a radioactive waste site. He sighs;...

Ann Frank, a volunteer at Project Backpack, will ask others on her trips to collect toiletries from their hotel rooms so she can donate them to the organization’s clients. “She brings in bag and bags of toiletries,” said Judy Pearlstone, executive...

Shirley Mosinger’s bookshelves are filled with impressive volumes, from Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” to a book of Chinese poetry her father gave to her when she was a child.Books and learning were cherished in her Jewish household when...

Her motto is “To Live Life Joyfully.” Recently, her students surprised her by showing up at one of her fitness classes wearing T-shirts that read, “We Are Living Joyfully.”The “Joy” in “Joyfully” also is the first name of Joy Millner,...

If Marvel created a superhero for volunteering, she’d probably look like Susan K. Goldberg. A self-described professional volunteer, Goldberg learned at a young age from her parents, Nancy and the late Jerome “Jerry” Kalishman, the importance of...

When Philip Deitch was in junior high school, his father came home from work one night after meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He asked Philip and his sister what they would do to fight racial injustice.So, in the eighth grade, Philip Deitch founded...

In 1972, when the then-president of the Covenant House board told Bonnie Solomon that she ought to join the staff of the housing facility, she was a bit skeptical. But he convinced her by saying it was only a temporary job, perhaps four or five months.“I...

Sometimes being an Unsung Hero simply means listening to other heroes. That’s a lesson that defines Carl Sherman of Creve Coeur.For the past three years, Sherman has volunteered with the Missouri Veterans History Project, helping to record oral histories....

During his time as a reservist, Stuart Katz didn’t see any combat.Well, almost.“I did fight a battle on H Street at a place called the Iron Butterfly where a bunch of the guys had a weekend pass,” he recalled with a laugh, remembering a Washington...

As we all remember from grade school, good penmanship is always a virtue. For Betsy Mehlman, it is a quality that also leads to good volunteerism.“With the tribute cards, I saw the writing and I just loved the printing so I just got into it,” said...

When the Ferguson-Florissant School District delayed the start of a new academic year after the fatal shooting of  Michael Brown in 2014, Elad Gross and other volunteers improvised, turning the local library into a school. Gross, who had been doing...