How Giving Selflessly Can Help You Find Happiness

Sharing joy while bearing pain

A chance conversation at a birthday party led Jennifer Margulis, 56, of Beaufort, South Carolina, to begin taking 90-year-old Bill Patton to play tennis. A former avid tennis player, Patton used a wheelchair to get around, but Margulis realized he could still hit balls. So for two years, once a week she transported Patton and his wheelchair from his nursing home to a Beaufort public court for individual lessons with Larry Scheper, an internationally ranked tennis pro.

Meanwhile, Margulis was having serious troubles of her own. “I was going through a lot of hard stuff when I was taking Bill to tennis. My husband was dealing with a life-threatening heart condition, and then I was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer and had to have my left eye removed,” Margulis says. “It was physically challenging to lift his wheelchair into my car and get him into the passenger’s seat. But the light in his eyes made it so worthwhile.”

The regular lessons continued until Patton’s death from a stroke last March. “It helped me so much to help him,” Margulis says. “It reminded me I was a human, not a walking cancer diagnosis.”

When John Graham lost his job as a minister at age 53, he and his wife, Kathy, got a second chance to help others. The couple started a nonprofit agency to help people coming out of prison restart their lives.

Courtesy John Graham

A fresh start for all

John Graham and his wife, Kathy, of Greenville, Ohio, were facing the prospect of losing their home in 2001 when John, 53 at the time, lost his job as a minister and, with it, their church-sponsored housing. “That was a low point, but we decided instead of rolling over and quitting, let’s do what we have a passion to do, which is help people,” John says. Scraping together the funds to buy a rundown 140-year-old house, the couple moved in and began restoration, doing the work with their own hands.

At the same time, John was volunteering in a local prison and learned that many people released from incarceration had nowhere to live. So he and Kathy opened their newly restored home to provide free housing and mentoring to those reentering society. That was the beginning of Good Samaritan Home, which now operates 21 houses in the Greater Dayton, Ohio, area. John estimates they’ve helped 2,500 formerly incarcerated men and women. Several former residents have moved on to join the staff.

“We’ve learned that we’re not that far removed from people who have been in jail,” he says. “And we all have times that we need a second chance.”

From cast-off to cozy

During nearly a decade of volunteering as a respite caregiver for foster children ranging from infants to teens, Carolyn Flannery of San Rafael, California, realized how little support was available when they aged out of the system.

“I had kids myself who were going off to college and could barely make their own bowl of cereal, and I thought, How are these foster kids going to put together a whole apartment? How are they going to put together a whole life?” she recalls.

As an interior designer, Flannery knew how much furniture goes to waste in the design world, discarded by those redecorating. In spring 2020, she began offering to furnish homes for foster children and others in need, turning to her network for donations.

“The first home that we did was for a 19-year-old boy, who came downstairs to greet the truck with a huge smile on his face, completely over-the-moon grateful,” says Flannery, who was 52 at the time.

Five years later, Make It Home works with more than 120 social service agencies throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, outfitting 60 to 70 households a month with everything from sofas and rugs to coffee mugs, utensils and cleaning supplies. Besides foster youth, recipients include domestic abuse survivors, veterans, older adults and immigrants, half of them children.

For Flannery and other volunteers, giving is a source of joy and, as Santi points out, “an act of hope. It says that ‘I still believe in something greater, and I want to be part of it.’ ”