Across Lake County, ordinary people are doing something extraordinary. They’re showing up — week after week, year after year — to love their neighbors In the Name of Christ. These are their stories.

Every need met through Love INC Lake County begins and ends with a volunteer. A furniture technician with a desire to create stable furniture for those in need. A retired woman who’s made a thrift boutique her second home. A former neighbor, once in need herself, who now answers the call in two languages. An intake minister praying with strangers for nearly two decades. A curriculum writer who teaches what she’s lived.

It’s the local church, volunteers, and faithful servants who make it happen. This Volunteer Appreciation Month, we want to introduce you to just a few of them.

Betty · Loved Twice Thrift Boutique
Since 2019 · Immanuel Church, Gurnee

When Betty retired, she and her sister wanted to give back without being tied down every single day. A Saturday shift at the Loved Twice Thrift Boutique seemed like a good start. Seven years later, she’s there three to four days a week, sometimes five. She’s so supportive of the boutique that she has her own key.

“Take it to Betty’s area” has become the shop’s unofficial motto, covering games, knitting supplies, sheets, paintings — anything that needs straightening. Her approach: largest to smallest, everything faced forward. Neatness counts.

What keeps Betty coming back isn’t a to-do list. It’s the people: Lynn and Jill, who run the boutique with warmth and grace; a steady customer who comes in every morning for prayer; and Glenda, a fellow volunteer whom Betty met at Saturday prayer time. That friendship led to something Betty hadn’t expected: a baptism. She and Glenda were baptized together in a friend’s backyard pool.

“I feel like I’m home. I can’t tell you how much being accepted into the store means to me.”

At 75, Betty says volunteering keeps her healthy, connected, and grounded. And about Jesus? “How He brings people where they need to be. People come in and say, ‘I’ve been looking for this!’ It’s the right place at the right time — and that’s not me. That’s Him.”

Jerry · Intake Minister
Since 2008 · Trinity Community Church, Libertyville

Jerry started volunteering in 2008, the year after he retired from Abbott. He’d known about Love INC for years through Trinity Community Church in Libertyville, a congregation that’s supported the ministry financially for decades. “The DNA of the church,” he says, “[is] very much to be involved in the community and to reach out, biblically, to the poor and needy.”

By nature an introvert, Jerry describes intake ministry as a stretch he’s never stopped feeling. Every conversation begins with prayer; he prays that the neighbor “would just really be able to sense that God loves and cares for them.” Then he listens: their story, their children, their needs. Near the end, he asks a quiet question that opens a different kind of door: “Do you think God cares for you?”

“I’ve just grown to fall in love with these folks, even though most of them I’ll never see or talk to again.”

Eighteen years in, Jerry says Love INC itself has become family. “I stay because I’ve just fallen in love with Love INC. It’s a family.” Volunteers from churches he never would have met otherwise are now brothers and sisters in the Lord. “I think God put me there to get ministered to, too.”

Sonja · Finances Forward Facilitator & Curriculum Writer, New Hope Ministry
Since 2019 · Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington

For nearly 20 years, Sonja has walked alongside people as they work toward financial freedom. When she returned to New Hope Ministry, she carried with her a vision for something deeper: a curriculum rooted in Scripture and real life. After a year and a half of writing and refining, Finances Forward launched in the Spring of 2026 with seven regular participants and materials in both English and Spanish.

What Sonja didn’t expect was how much the curriculum would teach her. Over the past two years, she and her husband walked through a season of unemployment and underemployment. “I was writing curriculum on finances,” she says quietly, “and we were struggling.” That tension became the heartbeat of the course. From the beginning, she made one commitment: there would be no shame in this course.

“We help people understand the impact of their decisions—not shame them for making them.” Through it all, God has been teaching Sonja more about who He is. He’s demonstrated to her that He is the Source, that He is faithful, present, and always right on time. A God who humbles and then lifts up, who makes it clear that everything comes from Him.

“I’ve seen it in ways I can’t explain,” she says. “Even when I don’t think I can be faithful, He is. He’s such a good Father.”

Don · Furniture Repair & Warehouse
Since 2018 · Gurnee Community Church

Don came to Love INC the way many good things happen: a friend asked.

Hank — a fellow volunteer he calls “a good leader for me” — talked him into it just less than a decade ago. Don has been showing up ever since. His role is unglamorous yet essential: furniture repair. He makes donated pieces serviceable, ensures every item ships with the hardware needed to assemble it, and has worked with others to turn a single, oversized table into two smaller ones better suited to the compact apartments neighbors actually live in.

Don is a retired chemistry teacher with a workshop full of vintage tools, some from the 1930s, inherited from his engineer father. Those skills — learned in a garage as a boy — now go into the hands of neighbors he’ll never meet.

Don shares that he continues to serve in part because of the sense of family he feels when he comes in for his volunteer shift. “I think everybody here has got their heart in the right place. Everyone says hello. It’s fun to come over here.”

Claudia · Spanish-Language Intake Minister & Translator
Since 2024 ·Vertical Encounter, Waukegan

Claudia knows what it feels like to be on the other side of the intake call. A few years ago, she was a newly arrived single mother of two, without beds for her family. A friend referred her to Love INC.

“When I received the call,” she says, “I really felt cared for.” That experience never left her. When the same friend later invited her to volunteer assembling starter kits for Spanish-speaking families, she said yes — and quickly saw the need for Spanish-language intake support.

Today Claudia does intakes, schedules deliveries, and translates when volunteers carry furniture into neighbors’ homes. She’s watched these families open their doors to the volunteers, strangers who showed up to serve, and seen the look of joy and gratitude on their faces.

“You can give without expecting anything in return. It’s such a blessing. God called us to serve, to love—because that’s how He loved us.”

Volunteering has changed Claudia, too. “I used to judge the struggle. I’ve learned to be more respectful. We all struggle. We are all different. That’s why God has called us to be light.” And in pain, she has found a place of safety: “Love INC has shown me that even in pain, I can have a place where God shows me His love.”

The Church at Work

Five volunteers. Five stories. Five churches represented in outreach to one community, creating transformation in hundreds of families each year just by showing up week after week.

Love INC provides the framework and the connections. But when Betty straightens a shelf, when Jerry talks with someone who has no bed to sleep on, when Sonja teaches from her own hard-won experience, when Don repairs a table, when Claudia translates not just words but belonging—that’s the body of Christ doing what it was made to do. And more often than not, the volunteers will tell you: they are being changed just as much as anyone they serve.

Could This Be You?

Whether your gift is listening, organizing, repairing, teaching, translating, or just showing up, there’s a place for you here. Join us for an upcoming Volunteer Orientation and discover how you can help transform a life in Lake County.

For more information, email us or call (847) 782-8630. We’d love to help you find a way to serve In the Name of Christ.