By Mary J Blackwood, American Red Cross of Colorado Public Affairs
When Kathy Coffey’s husband Robert died from brain cancer three years ago, she started looking for something meaningful to do with her life. Her kids were grown and she was retired. That’s when she remembered the American Red Cross.
“My husband was a Battalion Chief with the Mountain View Fire Protection District and served as Chief Master Sergeant in the Wyoming Air National Guard Aeromedical Evacuation Unit. At the time of the Waldo Canyon Fire, Rob was the Medical Division Captain for the Colorado Springs Fire Department. He set up a medical station to check out firefighters for duty. The American Red Cross set up a feeding station there and we talked to some of the volunteers. We decided volunteering with Red Cross would be something we would like to do when we retired.”
Then her husband received his diagnosis and they retired immediately and spent the next year trying to live the best life they could. Gradually, as his condition deteriorated, that changed into caregiving and then bereavement for Kathy. She spent a lot of time processing that loss and when COVID hit, she started looking for something meaningful to do with her life, remotely at first. She saw a mention of the Red Cross and remembered that she had entertained volunteering.
Since she was stuck at home she started taking all the training she could for different Red Cross volunteer jobs on-line. “I got trained in a bunch of stuff and it was really interesting. Another volunteer, Diana Dalager, became my mentor and suggested I join the COVID Shelter Strike Team. Well, that was really engaging. We had weekly on-line meetings and more training. It was a great opportunity to learn even before getting deployed.”
So in July 2020, she started deployments during Hurricane Hannah in Corpus Christi at a non-congregate shelter in a hotel for people who normally lived on their boats.
She was home a short time and then off to Houston for Hurricanes Marco and Laura, where she helped set up a congregate shelter ahead of the storms. The shelter was in the path of the storm when they opened it. They had two families for a brief stay; and when the hurricane turned and missed them, they closed the shelter. She was then sent back to Houston, where she was roused from sleep at 11 p.m. to drive across town and open another shelter, where she worked for ten days before returning home.
Kathy’s next deployment was to New Orleans for a week to learn how to be a shelter supervisor. Then she spent a week going to a different shelter each day to allow those supervisors to have a day off. All the shelters were non-congregate, ranging in size from 150 people to a larger one at a Sheraton hotel that was supporting 1,200 people.
After returning home again for less than a week, she was deployed to the Cameron Peak fire, in Colorado where she supervised a shelter for three weeks, trained other supervisors and set up other shelters.
One really challenging assignment occurred when, a few weeks ago, she was deployed to El Paso to help with Afghan refugee repatriation. The Army was sheltering them, and Red Cross was in charge of distribution of clothing and other essentials. “I made it my personal mission to welcome them to our country, to help in any way I could and to really listen to people and their needs. Luckily, there was at least one person in each building who spoke English and was willing to translate for us.”
And there is no end in sight. Just last year she was serving as shelter coordinator for Douglas County. Then suddenly this June she became shelter lead for the region. So how does she manage all these deployments with her family and dog, we wanted to know?
“Until this year, my two sons were still living at home and took care of everything. They have now moved on in their lives but I have a wonderful girlfriend who keeps my dog, waters the plants and takes care of my house. My dog thinks she has died and gone to heaven, she gets so much TLC and an occasional visit from me!”
Kathy Coffey is a shining example of how one person took a personal tragedy and turned it into a second lifetime of service, bringing a lot of comfort and joy along the way. The Red Cross would be much poorer without her.