By Steve Klamkin WPRO News
Governor Gina Raimondo traveled across snow-covered streets in her East Side Providence neighborhood Wednesday, to appeal for volunteers to help the elderly and disabled shovel out their blizzard-bombed homes.
“We have a lot of elderly folks, disabled folks, they can’t get out to shovel, and there’s this program Serve Rhode Island. They’re looking for volunteers,” Raimondo said in front of Rosalind Ladd’s Tabor Street home, where Brown University senior Sarah Schade was helping to clear the snow-covered porch and stairs.
Raimondo repeated the pitch that she first made in her final Tuesday night news conference on the Blizzard of 2015. Bernie Beaudreau runs the agency, which helps to connect volunteers with people in need.
“We’ve done 124 today, and we’ve had over 700 requests,” said Beaudreau, as he grabbed a shovel and pitched in to clear Ladd’s walk.
“I am so grateful,” said Ladd, who said she recently lost her snow shovel person of long standing at the home she has lived in for 50 years.
“I must said, I lost a night’s sleep worrying about how I was going to get this cleaned up,” she said.
Schade, a member of the Brown women’s rugby team said other Brown athletes and students had the day off due to the snow, and were happy to pitch in. She said that in her years at Brown, she hasn’t done much volunteering.
“I actually haven’t since I’ve been to Brown. It keeps you really busy and you forget that other people exist outside the Brown bubble,” she said.
Raimondo, who also played rugby when she was an undergraduate student at Harvard, pitched Schade to consider a career in Rhode Island after the Michigan native graduates with an engineering degree.
“So why don’t you stay in Rhode Island?” asked Raimondo.
“I’m not sure where I’ll be staying, actually,” said Schade.
“If you got a job here, would you stay?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Alright, so we’ve got to get you a job here in Rhode Island so you’ll stay,” said the governor, who’s made job creation her cornerstone.
“Sounds great,” said Schade.
