For Margie Yansura, volunteering with The Lord’s Place isn’t only about giving back to the community. It’s also about giving others who have experienced a tumultuous life the opportunity to find an smoother path forward.
“To me, giving back is the joy in life. I know not everyone is like that, but to me, it brings meaning to my life outside of my family,” Yansura told the Palm Beach Daily News.
The West Palm Beach native’s charitable efforts were honored recently when the Town of Palm Beach United Way awarded Yansura its Nettie Finkle Award in recognition of her years aiding the efforts of The Lord’s Place. The Lord’s Place, at 2808 N. Australian Ave. in West Palm Beach, is Palm Beach County’s largest agency serving homeless people.
“Margie has always operated from a place of radical compassion, believing that every human being deserves dignity, opportunity, and community,” Chief Advancement Officer Anne Noble of The Lord Place said in prepared statement about the award. “These values are not abstract for her — they show up in every interaction, every donation drive, every event she organizes, every chant she leads from the window of her car.”
Yansura learned those values at a young age from her parents while growing in the suburbs of Detroit. When she was 3, she said, her parents encouraged her to donate some of her toys to the local church, as the institution had been supporting Cubans fleeing their nation’s Communist revolution of the 1950s.
“My dad told us that he had given our toys to a family, and the most beautiful little, brown-eyed boy was going to have our toys,” she recalled.
Naturally as a child, Yansura said, she was a little sad about donating her toys, but it did instill a valuable lesson from her parents in her and her two siblings.
“They didn’t have to tell us that it’s good to help other people. They demonstrated it,” she said.
During Yansura’s elementary school years, her parents converted their basement into a place to house donations of clothes, which helped keep some of her classmates warm during the frigid winter.
“We would see kids in our classes wearing the clothes, but we knew never to say anything to anybody about it, because their family was just going through hard times and they needed help,” Yansura said.
Years later, when Yansura and her husband, Jeffrey Yansura, moved to West Palm Beach, they continued her parents’ legacy of giving back to the community.
Just a year after moving to Palm Beach County in 1978, Yansura helped organized a benefit effort at Lake Worth’s John Prince Park, to support Vietnamese refugees resettling in the area.
While working as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post’s former sibling community newspaper, The Evening Times, Yansura connected with Joe Ranieri, who would eventually found The Lord’s Place. At the time, Ranieri was involved his 1983 campaign to raise money for a local homeless shelter. His campaign involved sleeping on the steps of St. Ann’s Catholic Church in downtown West Palm Beach and later living for a month in a dumpster.
Once Ranieri established The Lord’s Place, Yansura joined as the organization’s public relations officer, a position she held for for 17 years before her retirment. Her career also included owning her own public-relations agency, Wordsmith Communications.
During that time, Ranieri’s organization started its annual sleepouts, during which participants were asked to spend one night sleeping outdoors to get a better understanding of the daily challenges facing the county’s homeless.
“It sounds a little hokey, but literally, you would wake up and be wet from the dew or you would hear people coming out of the bars and being noisy at 3 in the morning,” she said.
To get word out for the sleepout events, Yansura organized a walk through parts of Palm Beach County, from The Lord’s Place’s West Palm Beach campus south to its Boynton Beach men’s campus.
“So, that march in the last couple of years has become their main fundraiser, and was renamed March to End Homelessness,” she noted.
Since retiring from public relations in 2020, Yansura has taken a more hands-on role as a volunteer for The Lord’s Place. The first thing she did was to organize a creative writing class for women recently released from prison or jail.
“So, I would bring writing prompts — either thoughts or photos or artwork — and (blank) booklets so they could write,” she recalled. “It was great to hear their stories and their hopes for the future, because they had already paid their debt to society and were moving on from that.”
Yansura also teamed up with her friend and former Palm Beach Post columnist Emily Minor to host sewing classes at The Lord’s Place, so participants could learn how to create, maintain and repair their pillowcases, curtains or other household items.
Today, Yansura visits The Lord’s Place multiple times a week to help manage the institution’s clothing bank. With the apparel organized by size on heavy racks, the idea was to arrange things so that those coming to The Lord’s Place for clothing could “just select something like you would at a store.”
Outside of The Lord’s Place, Yansura donates her time to her church, the United Methodist Church of Palm Beaches, where she currently chairs the Missions Committee. In that role, she has organized annual donation drives for cereal for CROS Ministries; shoes for homeless people; blankets and warm clothing for The Lord’s Place; and Thanksgiving food baskets for a local school.
Twice a month, she takes part in the church’s Feeding the Hungry program, during which she helps hand out food to drivers and their families in hundreds of cars that stop by the church at 900 Brandywine Road in West Palm Beach.
“We as church members greet them, invite them to church if they don’t already have a place of worship and we ask if there’s anyone that we can pray for, for them,” she said. “We also hand out immigration cards in English, Spanish and Creole so folks know their rights if they are stopped by immigration officers.”
For Yansura, these acts are simply way of following the teachings of Jesus Christ.
“At out church, we call it being the hands, heart and feet Christ,” she said.
Diego Diaz Lasa is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at dlasa@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach United Way honors Margie Yansura’s decades of charity work
Reporting by Diego Diaz Lasa, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
