Class Note 1978
One of the joys of this job is discovering the incredible work being done by some of our classmates. I recently received a press release about an exhibition of truly striking nature photographs by Mark Lennon (www.marklennonimages.com). But his day job is what really blew me away.
Mark calls himself a matchmaker. He is founder and CEO of IRN—the Reuse Network. Every year IRN matches millions of pounds of surplus furniture from U.S. schools, hospitals, and companies with worldwide charities for disaster relief and economic development for needy communities.
When I caught up with Mark recently, he was on site in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “We are sending old furniture from the Boston Public Schools to charities in a bunch of different countries, on the order of 25 tractor-trailers of furniture.”
He was running a recycling cooperative in Concord, New Hampshire, back in 2002, when Boston University asked him to recycle a parking lot full of old dorm furniture because it couldn’t find an organization willing to take it. “We knew there had to be a better solution. So we started making calls to national and international nonprofits that provide relief and development on a national or global scale.” What he found was that there was lots of surplus furniture available, and lots of organizations that needed it, but no one to put them together. “Good furniture kept going into dumpsters, and kids kept doing schoolwork on wood planks.”
Lennon stepped up. Since 2002 IRN has shipped more than 6,000 tractor-trailers of furniture to charities around the world. Seventeen floors of furniture from Philadelphia shipped out to Nicaragua. A dormitory full of furniture from a Massachusetts college went to an orphanage in Haiti. Two hundred sixty pieces of furniture from an elementary school in New Mexico went to a primary school in northeast Kenya. “Classroom materials are solid gold to the charities we work with. They really concentrate on doing things for the children, and some of the pictures we have seen show kids working at desks made out of chunks of wood sitting on sawhorses. To replace that with these kinds of desks is really fantastic.”
Oh, and about Mark’s photography? He focuses on the natural world, offering different and sometimes startling ways to look at it. He says, “I don’t really care if my photographs are beautiful. I do hope they are arresting, in the sense that a viewer may pause and say, ‘Wow, that’s out there?’ And perhaps, after that, be a little more open to seeing and appreciating the marvels in the natural world that are all around us every day.”
Mark ended a recent email to me by saying, “Thanks for doing what must at times be a pretty thankless task.” Don’t let anybody in on my little secret—it’s not thankless at all when you come across stories such as this one.
—Rick Beyer, 1305 S. Michigan Ave., #1104, Chicago, IL 60605; rickbeyer78@gmail.com
