Heart for Fire Prevention…

With a goal to install 6,500 new fire alarms across Georgia by July 1, 2016, the Atlanta Red Cross knew exactly who to call – your favorite, friendly tool lenders!

The Home Fire Prevention Campaign is a nation-wide Red Cross effort to educate communities about fire safety, install smoke detectors, and practice fire drills. And, thanks to a partnership with our national headquarters, ToolBank USA, every ToolBank affiliate across the country is collaborating to ensure their local Red Cross can equip volunteers with ample safety gear and the tools needed to get the jobs done right.

This Valentine’s weekend, your Atlanta Community ToolBank kicked off the fun with a big tool load-out of drills and ladders to help install almost 300 new fire alarms in homes across Decatur’s Battle Forest neighborhood.

In 2015 alone, The Red Cross responded to 1,643 home fires across metro Atlanta, resulting in 1,128 residents needing immediate relocation and support services. With 420 of those fires occurring in Dekalb County, volunteers were eager to install new smoke detectors and provide replacement batteries, in addition to great safety plan tips.

The ambitious prevention campaign aims to reduce home fires by 25% and safety events are scheduled through the Fall. Volunteers are still needed to help install fire alarms, complete fire safety checklists and help families develop evacuation plans.

So, come on! Put some ATL ToolBank tools to great use as a Red Cross volunteer.  Sign up for an event date listed below by contacting  shana.lightfoot@redcross.org.

Home Fire Prevention Volunteer Dates

• February 13, 2016 – DeKalb – COMPLETED with ToolBank tools in hand!
• February 27, 2016 – DeKalb
• March 5, 2016 – Cherokee
• March 12, 2016 – Rockdale
• March 19, 2016 – Gwinnett
• March 19, 2016 – Fulton

Help even more volunteers support the causes you care about!
Click to DONATE NOW. 

All About Our Vets…

ATL ToolBank accepting a service award from long-term ToolBank member agency VEO!

As the original ToolBank, your local Atlanta Community ToolBank is proud to have essentially birthed its own parent nonprofit, ToolBank USA.  With a mission to replicate the tool lending model in the top 150 urban American hubs – ToolBank USA is planting a national powerhouse dedicated to wiping tool scarcity off the map!

This collective impact is transforming the way communities leverage volunteer labor and fostering a collaborative blueprint for sustainable self-efficiency. And, that impact touches every cause you care about. Check out how our network is actively working to serve those who gave all – our military veterans…

SPECIAL REPORT COURTESY OF TOOLBANK USA 

ToolBanks loaned out nearly a half million dollars’ worth of blue tools to organizations that engage veterans in a meaningful way. They include Veteran’s Empowerment Organization (VEO) in Atlanta,  The Mission Continues in Atlanta and Houston, The 6th Branch in Baltimore, Lone Star Veterans Organization in Houston, Team Rubicon with ToolBank Disaster Services, Purple Heart Homes in Charlotte, and Team Depot, which is active in nearly every ToolBank city.

Dobbins Air Force Base puttin’ the blue tools to great use, revitalizing a historic cemetery.

Some of the agencies look to returning veterans as their source of volunteers, while others regard veterans as their clients. For most, it’s a mixture of both, assisting veterans in need and leveraging volunteerism as a healthful way for service men and women to transition back to civilian life. Ramps, home repairs, home retrofitting, and weatherization are among the most popular projects fueled by ToolBank tools in support of veterans. Tools are de rigueur to conduct these projects, and ToolBanks from coast to coast are proud to aid these organizations in their inspiring call of duty.

Want to keep even more volunteers working hard for us all? Click to Donate NOW!

Blue-Tooled 25…

Your Atlanta Community ToolBank is officially saluting 25 YEARS of fabulous blue tool lending! And, we’re celebrating by making the first 25 of this New Year shine with service. Cheers to the dedicated volunteers making it happen across our state!

First 25 Of 2016:
175 Service Projects Completed
4,062 blue-tooled volunteers
16,428 hours of service given
Over $73,000 worth of ToolBank tools put to great use

Blue Tool Powered:
22 park and greenspace improvements
75 home and facility repairs 
1 historic cemetery gravestone installation (Clay Cemetery in Kirkwood – go check them out!)

Touching every cause you care about. It’s what your ATL ToolBank is all about!

Many thanks to the wonderful service partners putting the blue tools to great work this month:

Action Not Words Project Incorporated, The Lithonia City Farmers Market Construction, After School All Stars, Atlanta City Council: District 12, Blue Heron Nature Preserve, Captain Planet Foundation, Central Atlanta Progress, Change to Humanity, CHRIS Kids, Concrete Jungle, Covenant House Georgia, Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential, Georgia Conservancy, Good Shepherd Community Church, Grant Park Conservancy, HouseProud Atlanta, Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, Lifecycle Building Center, Panola Mt. State Park, Park Pride, Raising Expectations Inc., Trees Atlanta, Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture, West Atlanta Watershed, Youth Villages at Inner Harbour

Ready to keep even more service teams equipped for action?
Simply CLICK to DONATE NOW!

 

 

Tools Can Build…

A really big bridge!

We love to brag on the blue tools and all the great things our member agencies and their incredibly dedicated volunteers can do. For this posting, let’s hear it straight from the park’s mouth! Check out the fun as our pals from Park Pride review thier incredible adventure at Jennie Drake Park. **Recap totally stolen from http://www.facebook.com/parkpride.

Blue Can Build…

Value of tool borrowed: $19,479
Cost to charitable agency: $705.46 Yep, all this for only $705.46!
Tools utilized: power drills and saws, shovels and spades, weed wrenched and McLeod tools, wheelbarrows, measuring tapes, hammers, sledgehammers, tarps, trashgrabbers, generators, work gloves, socket sets, folding tables and more…

Amazing Feats Accomplished: 

On Thursday, October 29th, 150 volunteers from Bennett Thrasher descended on Jennie Drake Park in the northwest Atlanta neighborhood of Collier Heights.

Jennie Drake Park was an undeveloped park (aside from the beautiful park entrance that was dedicated in May of this year, and the City of Atlanta park sign). There were a number of branch lined paths that meandered through the wooded greenspace, and neighborhood children liked to jump back and forth between the banks of the small creek that runs through the center.

On this Bennett Thrasher workday, however, the park was transformed! Volunteers installed 2 bridges to cross the creek, 2 benches built and installed, cleared land and installed plantings and created a new cobblestone park entrance, build a stone switchback path leading into the park, created about 750 of trail through the park (about 1/2 a raised gravel trail and the other half a mulch trail), and planted almost 400 native plants … WHEW!

It was quite a day and so much was accomplished! We’re proud to have been part of such a great partnership.

Thank you Friends of Jennie Drake Park for your passion for this space and for inviting us out for a transformative day.

Thank you Bennett Thrasher for your enthusiasm for hard-work, community and parks!

And thank you Councilmember Felicia Moore for the role you played in bringing this park to fruition and joining us as we turn the dream into reality!

We look forward to our next workday with you both.

We all invite you out to Jennie Drake Park to enjoy this amazing greenspace!

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Blue Tooled Gwinnett…

Your friendly tool lenders love supporting the annual Gwinnett Great Days of Service weekend. 2015 marked our 5th year staffing a 7-day temporary lending location in Lawrenceville, GA. Thanks to our sponsors Nordson Corporation Foundation and Maltbie Street Associates, truckloads of blue tools trucked up the highway to serve a diverse range of projects including: installation of birdhouses and specialty bat caves, school campus landscaping, community garden fencing, city cleanups, nonprofit pressure washing and more!

Impact At A Glance
18 projects sites tooled up.
672 volunteers equipped with ATL ToolBank tools.
90 service projects completed. Done. Finito!
Way too many smiles to count.

Katie Morris of The Gwinnett Daily Post enjoyed the weekend at Duluth’s Glancy Rehab Center – check out her recap below, along with great pics of the entire weekend! And, don’ t forget to CLICK NOW and keep even more volunteers working hard for us all.

Blue Tooled Gwinnett

DULUTH — With clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine, volunteer Patricia Parker said Friday morning was a lovely day to work in the garden.

“This was perfect weather,” Parker said. “It’s almost identical to last year.”

Parker was part of a group of volunteers from WEG Electric Corp., along with a few community volunteers, who got out their gardening gloves and went to work sprucing up the Glancy Rehabilitation Center gardens.

The project is one of hundreds taking place across the county Friday and Saturday during the 16th annual Gwinnett Great Days of Service. Organized by the Gwinnett Coalition for Health and Human Services, the two-day volunteer event benefits local nonprofit agencies that provide goods and services to community members struggling financially or emotionally.

This is the second year WEG Electric volunteers have donated their time to Glancy, a nonprofit rehabilitation center specializing in helping people with neurological and orthopedic impairments in Duluth. With the help of $150 in supplies donated by Buck Jones Nursery, volunteers pruned rose bushes, pulled up spring flowers and planted fall flowers, weeded gardening boxes and more.

Parker said it was great to return and see their work from last year, including a stone wall they built in the Glancy garden, as well as the familiar faces of the center’s staff. Mary Anne Lomma was also happy to return this year.

“The staff is just so welcoming and kind and seem excited to have volunteers,” Lomma said.

According to Kelly Dunham, Glancy Center’s Community Relations Coordinator, the nonprofit depends on the help, and the gardens play an important role in the patient’s rehabilitation. In addition to providing a therapeutic atmosphere, the gardens help patients re-learn gardening skills that they can carry with them when they leave, Dunham said.

Parker has become attached to the project over the past two years and plans to return to the facility in the spring with some of her co-workers to help with planting and maintenance.

“You feel like it becomes yours and you want to come back and help maintain what you started,” Parker said.

Ready to keep the blue tools serving across GA? DONATE NOW.

Real Tools Bringin’ Real Progress…

Better Together…

Great Friday of service as Youth Villages Americorps, Friends of Riverside Park and Park Pride put the blue tool magic to work transforming a former incinerator site on Atlanta’s West Side into a 100-acre park. OK, the vision was not completed in one work day. BUT… the plan is in motion and great progress abounds. Volunteers removed invasive overgrowth and construced new trails – all in preparation for the future Riverwalk Atlanta. This amazing park space is located close to the Chattahoochee River and will offer local residents and vistors alike ample opportunity to get active, enjoy nature or maybe even relax with a real book or two! Stay tuned for exciting updates.

Friends in Service…

We love supporting local parks and working with the Park Pride team. And, special thanks to our photo “model” John, for always keeping the blue tools so organized! Nonprofits like Park Pride and all of their affiliated Friends of Parks teams are THE reason we can stay active, enjoy nature and gasp – maybe even crack open a real book under a balmy sky. This year alone, more than 1,000 volunteers have already put almost $50,000 worth of ‪#‎ATLToolBank‬ tools to work under the direction of dedicated coordinators like John. So, go enjoy those safe and pretty parks. And, when you get a chance, support a nonprofit fundraiser, high-five a volunteer and be sure to hug up on a nonprofit staffer. We can all make an impact, in our own unique way!

Ready to keep even more volunteers working hard for us all?
CLICK and Donate a buck to your Atlanta Community ToolBank today!

Save The Ducks… One ToolBank Booted Foot At A Time!

No one wants to swim in the muckety-muck. And now, thanks to some seriously adventurous volunteers, local ducks can wade free and clear. It was all hands on tools at Zonolite Park in Druid Hills this weekend, as Park Pride, South Fork Conservancy and Community Bucket joined forces to tackle the great cattails invasion.

Clearly, fun was the order of the day. But, the hard work addressed a serious issue, as the spikey and often pesky cattail is competitively superior under stable water conditions. A hostile takeover pro, this crazy plant blocks wildlife and reduces plant bio-diversity – and that’s just not good.

Kudos to all the brave souls who leapt in to save the pond, and kept on smiling even when a little water made it through those ToolBank rubber boots!

ToolBank Tools At Work: 10 Loppers, 30 Rubber Boots, 30 Rubber Gloves

 Ready to keep even more volunteers tooled up to serve? Click and DONATE NOW!

*Photos stolen — err, borrowed from Park Pride

Blue Tool Tippin’ – Compost Style!

Your ATL ToolBank’s fab new intern, Bernie Atkinson, has already mastered the warehouse – so we’ve set her loose with her first #DIY blog! Check out her adventures in compost below and stay tuned for more of Bernie’s Adventures in Tool Land…

Super Easy. Super Stylin’.  How to MakeYour Very Own Compost Bin Out of Pallets!

We are fast approaching the end of summer here in Georgia, and with that, gardening season is coming to a close.  That doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t do something to make next years’ plantings even better, starting right now.  If you don’t already have a compost bin working in your backyard, fall is a great time to start it off.  The last of this years’ grass clippings mixed with some raked up leaves and kitchen scraps make up one of nature’s finest soil amendments so that your veggies can grow bigger, more productively, and, if you’re doing it right, cheaper.

Pallets are a great source of upcyclable wood, and can frequently be found for free on Craigslist or even on the side of the road.  Be sure, though, that the pallets you have are safe to be used for vegetable gardening.  Look for an “HT” marking somewhere on the wood.  This stands for “Heat Treated”.  The other treatment used on pallets is Methyl Bromide, marked MB, which is a pesticide and fumigant that could potentially leak into your compost.  If a pallet is unmarked, it is best to fear the worst and not use that pallet for a food contact application.

For this project, we will be using the following tools and materials:

• Hammer
• Wonder Bar
• Cordless Screwdriver
• Drill Bit and Phillips Head Bit
• Clamps
• Saw
• Safety Goggles
• 2” Screws
• Four Pallets of the Same Size

We also enthusiastically recommend a hardy pair of work gloves and a bucket for catching nails.

Step 1:  Remove the bottom slats

Start by removing the bottom slats of the pallet using the hammer and wonder bar.  A few gentle taps with the hammer should allow you to finagle your pry bar in and start getting some work done.

Remove all three bottom slats from all four of your pallets, pull any nails still left in the stringers, and your pallet should look something like this:

Step 2:  Remove the stringers from two of the pallets

Next, we are going to pull the two outside stringers off of two of the pallets.  Using the same hammer and pry technique we used in step one, start loosening the slats from the 2X4’s.

To get the nails out of the slats with as little effort as possible, tap each board with the hammer.  This pushes the nail heads out of the wood and allows some purchase for your hammer to pull them out.

At this point, two of our pallets should look like this:

Step 3:  Cut a pallet in half

Next we are going to take one of the pallets we just created and cut it in half.  You can use a lot of different kinds of saw to do this, so long as it can cut a flush line through a 2X4 against a slat.  We used a circular saw.

Step 4: Screw it all together

Take one pallet with three stringers and one pallet with just the middle stringer and stand them up to make a corner.  Square up the edge and clamp the pallets together.  (We had to set them on another pallet to give us a flat working surface, but it isn’t attached.)

Starting at the top, begin predrilling holes two per slat.  If you try to screw into the pallets without predrilling, the wood will split.  When you’re done predrilling, go back through, this time with screws.

Join another three stringer board to the other side and repeat the predrilling and screwing steps.

Finally, screw the half pallet to bottom half of the front of the bin.

That’s it!  Put the bin somewhere in your yard and start filling it.  With the occasional turn with a pitchfork, you should have a heaping helping of loamy, nutrient rich compost to add to your gardens next spring.

Meet The Tool Pro…

From Left to Right: Facility Manger CJ Clark, Lorraine Lombardi and Ron Sargent proudly pose with newly constructed tool storage bins.

Facility maintenance pro by trade, world changer by spirit – Lorraine Lombardi is truly a renaissance woman. An impromptu day volunteering for a home repair agency in Atlanta over 8 years ago led to a love of using the blue tools and sustained commitment to the ToolBank cause.

“It’s a win-win,” she explains. “No other nonprofit helps so many people.”  Her service has included stints at the Tool Rush Sale, mega tool painting, warehouse remodeling at the new facility and now, post-retirement, she’s graciously co-managing the Atlanta ToolBank repair shop alongside fellow volunteer Ron “The Professor” Sargent.

Recognized as Volunteer of The Year in 2012, Lorraine is beloved by staff and volunteers for her contagious smile and can-do attitude. A resident of Decatur, GA she especially enjoys the ToolBank impact in her own backyard –  with 2 new community gardens, over 40 home repair projects and more than 15 community clean-ups completed in just the past 10 months!

Ready to keep even more volunteers working hard for us all? Click and Donate Now – every dollar given puts even more blue tools in volunteer hands. 

Sound the Alarm…

Photo: Grace Lee Photography

It’s another volunteer victory in the big city ya’ll!  A whooping 625 Atlanta volunteers hit the streets this simmering June 11th-14th weekend, donating 2,500 hours of service to pretty much every cause you can imagine. And the one thing they all have in common? Blue tools. Lots of blue tools. $26,450 worth of blue tools, to be exact. And just what did all those ToolBank tools do? Check it out:

• Weeding and Mulching in the Old 4th Ward along the Atlanta BeltLine
• Facility repair and fresh paint for Heart to Nourish Hope’s DORM program, a transitional housing service for adult males
• Neighborhood clean-up with the Camelot Condo Association
• Awesome art exhibit with Dashboard Co-op
• Community fair with E.L. Connally Elementary
• Greenspace improvement at Lindsay St. Park with Greening Youth Foundation
• Fundraising race for Midtown Assistance Center
• Repair work for Risla Institutes’s farm building
• Plantings with Trees Atlanta
• Landscaping for Historic Oakland Cemetery
• Painting across Gould Street with SEED
• Neighbor helping neighbor home improvements with Cabbagetown Initiative Community Development Corp
• Atlanta Bicycle Coaltion raising funds for the Atlanta BeltLine via the Tour de BeltLine
• Community Bucket all-stars improving the Atlanta Community ToolBank warehouse

AND THE BEST PART?
Total tool use cost to the charitable sector for all this fun – Only $795.00. 

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Special thanks to Grace Lee Photography for the awesome pics of Community Bucket in action.

Ready to keep even more volunteers working hard for us all? Click and Donate Now – every dollar given puts even more blue tools in volunteer hands.