Duncan Aviation facility maintenance worker Kevin Miller helps load a bed frame on on Thursday. Spreetail started a program five years ago that delivers mattresses to those transitioning out of homelessness. Bryan Seck coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.
KENNETH FERRIERA, Journal Star
Spreetail workers deliver a mattress to Kayla Tobey (left), as part of a philanthropic initiative to help residents transitioning out of homelessness on Thursday. Spreetail, an e-commerce start-up, buys the mattresses and Bryan Seck, workforce development director with the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development, coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.Â
KENNETH FERRIERA, Journal Star
Spreetail workers help load mattresses from a hanger located at Duncan Aviation on Thursday. Spreetail started a program five years ago to delivers mattresses to those transitioning out of homelessness. Bryan Seck, workforce development director for the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Devleopment, coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.
Five years ago, all Bryan Seck knew about a local e-commerce startup named Spreetail is that it was a company that could get stuff.
And Seck, at the time a homeless advocate at Lincoln Public Schools, needed stuff.
Specifically, he needed beds.
He worked to help find homes for families who’d been evicted or fled domestic violence or for whatever complex reasons found themselves living at the city mission or in a car or a friend’s apartment.
He connected them to the services and the people that could help with that, but Seck noticed a trend: often families moving into an apartment now had the bedrooms they needed, but not beds to put in them, making do with blankets spread out on the floor as makeshift mattresses.
Seck would get families settled, then check back a couple of days later and realize all their money had gone to utilities and rent, leaving nothing to buy the furniture and kitchen and bathroom supplies they needed to put in those homes.
“It was just killing me,†he said “We were working so hard to get these families housed but that’s not the end of the story. It’s a roof. That’s all.â€
He called a friend — one of those friends who knows people all over the community — and he said: Call Parker Van Roy.
Van Roy worked at Spreetail and told Seck he’d see what he could do to help. About a month later he called back with 43 mattresses for him.
That prompted another call to someone who might help with Seck’s newest need — storage. Connie Duncan, whose family owns Duncan Aviation, offered a storage hangar, Seck put the mattresses there and — before long — found homes for them.
That was the beginning.
Five years, 931 mattresses and 440-some families later, the one-time fix is now Spreetail’s primary philanthropy program, which it has expanded to offices in Omaha, Indianapolis and Austin, Texas, said Chad Kilpatrick, the company’s director of talent community.
Five years ago, Seck said, Spreetail was just starting its philanthropy program, and this was a need not being met by social service agencies. Today, it’s one of the company's key philanthropies that has delivered more than 2,500 beds to all four communities.
Lincoln’s program — which has delivered more than a third of the total beds — is special, he said.
“Not many companies get the opportunity to partner across a community like we do and provide for families in need or down on their luck,†Kirkpatrick said. “There’s a certain pride in working for a company that’s doing something special like this.â€
In the other cities, Spreetail works with nonprofits, which find people in need and deliver the beds.
“Here in Lincoln he delivers them all himself,†Kirkpatrick said. “If I could clone him and put him in other cities, I would.â€
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Various nonprofits, agencies like The Hub, the City Mission and Friendship Home and others such as school social workers, call when they have a family that needs a bed.
Seck, now workforce development director for the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development, calls the folks at Duncan Aviation. There, maintenance crews on duty 24 hours a day can help him load his pickup whenever he calls.
Spreetail now buys “mattresses in a box,†which are much easier to deliver. The foam mattresses come with bed frames and are delivered with a new set of sheets.
On Thursday, when Seck was done with work, they loaded nine twin and five full mattresses into his truck and he delivered them.
Annabellah Tobey, a seventh grader getting settled into an apartment with her mom, Kayla Tobey, got the 918th bed loaded onto Seck’s truck over the past five years.
She and her mom were living in the Hastings area when they lost everything last fall. They’d been living in the mobile home Tobey owned when she lost her job and got behind on the rent for the lot where they kept their trailer. They were evicted and the owners of the mobile home park sold her trailer and nearly everything in it, she said.
Tobey came to Lincoln to start over. Her daughter stayed with her mom in Hastings.
“I moved here with the clothes on my back in October,†Tobey said.
She’s lived at the mission and worked, trying to get back on her feet. The mission helped her find an apartment, she used federal stimulus money to buy some furniture for the apartment and she was reunited with Annabellah.
Tobey bought a blow-up mattress, but Annabellah had been sleeping on the couch. That changed Thursday, when Seck pulled up in his pickup.
“I was so excited,†Tobey said.
It's not just mattresses that find their way into new apartments.
In the storage hangar, along with about 140 mattresses, Spreetail has bags full of children’s books it buys through the city library to give to families with small children when Seck delivers the mattresses. They’ve got kitchen utensils and pots and pans, too — items they’ve been able to buy inexpensively, there for the families who need them.
Three years ago, Seck started working with Messiah Lutheran, which gets furniture donations from its members, along with other household items, and keeps them in storage for families in need.
Often, when Seck visits with families who have gotten new mattresses, he finds out what else they might need — and calls the folks at Messiah Lutheran.
Sometimes, working together, a workforce development director, an e-commerce business and church volunteers can turn an empty apartment into a furnished one in a day.
That’s satisfying work.
“You have this moment when you can say to yourself, ‘We’ve helped this family,'†Seck said. “That’s just a cool thing.â€
Duncan Aviation facility maintenance worker Kevin Miller helps load a bed frame on on Thursday. Spreetail started a program five years ago that delivers mattresses to those transitioning out of homelessness. Bryan Seck coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.
Spreetail workers deliver a mattress to Kayla Tobey (left), as part of a philanthropic initiative to help residents transitioning out of homelessness on Thursday. Spreetail, an e-commerce start-up, buys the mattresses and Bryan Seck, workforce development director with the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development, coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.Â
Spreetail workers help load mattresses from a hanger located at Duncan Aviation on Thursday. Spreetail started a program five years ago to delivers mattresses to those transitioning out of homelessness. Bryan Seck, workforce development director for the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Devleopment, coordinates the operations with various social services and nonprofit agencies.