Family Fund: Mustard Seed's furnishings help families at crucial times

Nellie Campbell, a grandmother of 9, received help from the Mustard Seed of Central Florida

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Think about the things you take for granted each day.

Family and friends? Sure, sometimes we forget to appreciate the people who mean the most to us.

An education, a job and a car to get from place to place? All three are so fundamental that we often overlook their importance, too.


What about even-more-basic needs, such as a bed to sleep on, clean clothes to wear and a sturdy pair of shoes?

For many of us, those things are like the air we breathe: something we couldn't live without but don't stop to think about.

For some people in our community, though, such essentials would go unfulfilled without organizations such as the Mustard Seed of Central Florida, one of the many nonprofit agencies supported by the Orlando Sentinel Family Fund Holiday Campaign.

Just ask Nellie Campbell, a 65-year-old grandmother of nine who has struggled to keep all the children together through a series of evictions. Without any money for a truck, each move meant that the family left some things behind.

By the time Campbell moved her brood into a small house in Orlando's Parramore neighborhood last month, they were sleeping on the floor and using a couple of old, plastic patio chairs in the living room.

The Mustard Seed provided her with three beds, a sofa, a kitchen table and chairs, and a clothes dryer.

For $75, families can take whatever they need, even enough furniture to furnish an entire home, from the organization's large warehouse west of Eatonville.

The real bargain isn't the price, but the relief that comes to an adult who can tuck a child into a bed at night rather than lie him on the floor. Or the sense of normalcy when a family can share a meal around a table rather than make do with laps and a few old chairs.

"We had no furniture," Campbell said. "We didn't have anything."

She still doesn't have much. The small house she rents is a tight fit for the seven grandchildren who live with her. The Mustard Seed didn't have a washing machine on the day she visited, so she washed laundry for eight people by hand in the bathtub until she found a washing machine at a garage sale last week.

She scraped together the $75 for furniture from the Mustard Seed out of the family's grocery money.

It has been a tough year for Campbell, whose simple life was complicated by a series of medical problems. Glaucoma blinded her right eye, and she is losing vision in her left. She suffers from congestive heart failure and other ailments, and her family lives off her disability check and one received by her oldest grandchild, who has cerebral palsy.

Now, though, she has the satisfaction of knowing he is sleeping on a proper mattress.

"I had a box spring and put some blankets on it to make it soft, but it was still hard," she said.

A broad smile takes over the face of Clarence Nichols, 24, when he talks about his new bed.

"It's like I'm on a cloud," he said.

Campbell said of the Mustard Seed: "Where else can you go and, for $75, get everything you need for your home? They helped us a lot."

The organization helped 919 families furnish their homes during the agency's fiscal year that ended in June, a 9 percent increase versus the year before. The Mustard Seed also provided 2,200 people in need with mattresses and recycled an additional 6,500 mattresses that weren't reusable.

Without the Mustard Seed's services, Campbell knows where she and hundreds of others in need would be.

"Back on the floor," she said. or 407-420-5448

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