Linda Barnes thought she wanted to be a social worker, and though that turned out not to be a job title she would hold, she has found other ways throughout her life to help others.
“I think something has to touch your heart for you to want to volunteer with an organization,” she says. “That’s been the case with me. Our organizations, our nonprofits, do so much good. We’ve got to help the individuals and that, in turn, helps our community.”
Barnes started volunteering through United Way while she was in the thick of a busy career with Entergy. She was traveling a good bit when she got started.
“Most of us that work and have had very active careers, we don’t want to sit at home, but it’s hard, too, because we want to travel and be involved in other organizations,” says Barnes, 75, who retired in 2012.
Barnes, as part of a United Way steering committee, is helping with a new program that helps retirees get plugged in to short-term volunteer opportunities.
Retired United offers descriptions and time commitments required of volunteers for various organizations that participate. For example, Easterseals needs volunteers to help with its Artistic Realization Technologies program in July. There are time slots on a sign-up sheet on the website, heartaruw.org/retire, indicating how many volunteers are needed, what they will be asked to do and even what they should wear to do it.
“It’s great because people can volunteer if they want to or if they have time,” she says. “But there’s not a long-term commitment. I’m hoping it will be a very successful program.”
Barnes first got involved with United Way through her job at Entergy.
“I think they always wanted their employees to be involved in the community,” she says. “I don’t know that I would have really gotten involved with United Way if Entergy hadn’t encouraged its employees to do that, and I headed up our campaign at Entergy for years and years.”
HELPING AWARD FUNDS
Then she chaired the Community Investment Committee, evaluating grant applications and helping award funds.
“I look back and think about some of those experiences and I just don’t know how anyone could see some of the things we did and just not have such a heart for helping,” she says.
Barnes recalls touring a shelter with other committee members and hearing about six young boys who had been brought in the night before. She learned that the boys were amazed that they would each have their own beds in the shelter.
“I still get tears thinking about this” she says. “They thought they had to sleep together. They had all been sleeping in the same bed.”
Barnes later got involved with Methodist Family Health.
“That’s one of the things that I do on a very regular basis,” she says.
Methodist Family Health uses United Way grants to help stock their closet with hygiene items, clothing, blankets and toys.
“I had a family member who lost her mother at age 11, and she was spiraling down. I mean, she was close to being suicidal. She went to counseling at Methodist Family Health, and it saved that child’s life,” Barnes says. “So I had been exposed to it and I started volunteering, and they asked me to be on the board.”
BLANKETS IN THE SNOW
Last winter, as snow fell, a teacher at a school where children who are served by Methodist Family Health asked for as many blankets as she could get.
“She said, ‘Well, they’re going to close the school and they’re going to send the children home because it’s snowing and I’m afraid they’re going to go home and not have any heat,'” Barnes says. “She gathered armfuls of blankets to take and give to the children.”
Barnes also volunteers through her church, St. James United Methodist Church, as well, serving meals to homeless people at Canvas twice a month.
“We prepare a meal on Monday and then we take it down to the facility,” she says. “I usually go and serve because you just kind of get to know some of those people. There are a couple of individuals there that will always come and tell me, ‘I got to work a few days this week,’ and things like that.”
The last seven years she worked for Entergy, she was involved in helping low-income customers, many of whom were elderly or disabled.
“I was certified to teach a poverty simulation course and I’ve taught that a couple of times nationally,” she says. “This was the thing I always tried to stress for us to have a better community, we have to realize that what we’re doing is a hand up, not a hand out, and we just really have to come to that. And you don’t have to have any special skill set — all you have to have is a sharing heart. You just find your little niche.”
While she has never had a business card identifying her as a social worker, she says her college degree in that field has without question been a benefit along the way.
FARMING CHILDHOOD
Barnes grew up in Nashville in Howard County, in a family that made a living through cotton, soybean and cattle farming. She spent her childhood riding horses and walking through woods.
“I’m a country girl at heart. My family wasn’t wealthy by any means. We struggled as farmers, but I always knew that there was no question about me going to college,” she says.
Her brothers had gone to college before her, and she considers herself fortunate to have gotten scholarships to help pay her way.
“I had work-study and I worked the whole time I was in college,” she says
She became one of the first female interns hired by the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
“They always allowed male law students and I said, ‘I want to go.’ My specialty was criminology and I wanted that experience,” she says, who got the opportunity only after she approached the associate secretary there and then the commissioner.
She met her husband, John, a special service officer, through that internship.
They married two weeks after she graduated from Southern State College, now Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia in 1972.
She and John had been married for 45 years when he died in 2018.
NOT AFRAID TO ASK
“Anyway, I just wanted the experience from that internship and I wasn’t afraid to ask,” she says. “I really was exposed to people that live such different lifestyles and that needed some help along the way.”
Parolees often sought John out.
“He would try to help them, to get back on their feet, sometimes financially,” she says. “By then he had another career, he had an insurance agency. I remember a couple of them that would come to our house and just ask him to help them find a job or maybe a little bit of money.”
After graduating and moving to Little Rock to be with her new husband, Barnes had trouble finding a job. She worked briefly at the boys’ training school in Wrightsville to get some experience in the field.
“It was frustrating. I didn’t feel like anyone really cared and some of the boys just fell through the cracks,” she says. “It was just a temporary position. I thought I might want to work in corrections as a parole officer or something and that was just a temporary way to get experience.”
She was the director of a small private school for a bit, as well.
“Then my mother became terminally ill and I moved home for the last few months,” she says. “Then I came back and worked for Coca Cola for a while, on the phone calling and taking orders.”
Next she took a job at Baptist Medical Center.
“I started out in human resources and then I went to work at Entergy and I did their recruiting, their engineering and professional recruitment, their college recruiting program because when I was at Baptist I had handled their employment department and had recruited nurses.”
WORKING WITH CUSTOMERS
Around 2005, Barnes was promoted to a new position that involved working with low-income customers, many of whom were elderly or disabled.
“You know, that’s just full circle for me,” she says. “I didn’t use my degree, really, until the very end. I was able to really work with some of our customers who needed help and assistance and just really got to focus more on things that were important to me, the caring part of it and being able to help and give to others. That’s what I did for the last seven years before I retired.”
If you have an interesting story about an Arkansan 70 or older, please call (501) 425-7228 or email: kdishongh@adgnewsroom.com