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Book Chronicles the Journey of Helping an Elderly Man Find a Home with Hearth

March 2009

Read excerpts from Park Street Angels...

In the summer of 2006, Chris Nordstrom met Bob Wright who sat on a milk crate on the sidewalk outside Park Street Church in Boston. Walking to work one morning, rather than avoiding eye contact, she overcame her fear, crossed the street and greeted him. They became friends, and Christina, with friends Sue Straley and Jonathan Margolis, helped facilitate his progress from Park Street to the Ruggles Assisted Living Center in Roxbury, a permanent home for homeless seniors operated by Hearth.

Christina Nordstrom is a health educator and has spent most of her work life designing and directing health education programs. Gainfully employed for over 30 years, her position at a suburban hospital was discontinued in 2003 because of the [then] struggling healthcare economy.

Over the next three years, she pieced together several jobs—some temporary, some part-time—to make ends meet; this was “patchwork time.” She relied on partial unemployment compensation to help fill in the ever-widening gap. Faced with losing her home, the generosity of family and friends who offered gift coupons, loans and outright financial gifts, helped her get by. In 2006 when she found full-time employment as a program director with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, she promised never to forget “patchwork time.”

A little book with a large message, Park Street Angels is an accounting of how she kept that promise.

It began simply as a series of almost daily emails to her retired hometown friend, Sue Straley, with a description of what she encountered each day—ordinary, every-day experiences made extraordinary by what she learned and received in return. Encouraged by her friend to “write this down!” the messages became a “chronicle of hope.”