This winter Steven Sobel is plowing the driveways and walkways of people who need help with those chores.
He doesn’t charge a fee for the work but he does take donations to support Be Better, the charity he founded last year to buy winter clothing for kids in foster care.
“People may not be able to pay a plow company but they offer me some money,” Sobol said Thursday. “They just come out their doorway and hand me a donation. It’s fantastic.”
Sobel, 32, of Hampden grew up on the Blue Hill peninsula and was used to seeing the community rally when someone needed help. His first job out of high school was working with teenagers in a residential facility, many of whom had been in foster care.
Last year, he decided to use what he’d learned from those experiences to create the Be Better nonprofit to raise money to buy new winter gear for kids in foster care.
“I wanted to build something that my 4-year-old son Ryker and I could do together, something we could see through from start to finish that would help others,” he said Thursday. “In parenting, I often tell him to be better next time and I will be, too.”
Now, Ryker is learning how to give back by helping to clear walkways with a kid-sized shovel. He also gets to spend a lot of quality time with his dad.
Sobel, who works in Ellsworth as a building manager, raised about $2,000 over the summer and fall on Facebook, doubling the $1,000 goal he’d set for himself. He worked with the Bangor office of Adoptive and Foster Families of Maine Inc. to find children who need winter clothing.
With that money, he bought 42 new coats, 20 pairs of snow pants, 15 sets of gloves and 15 hats.
“I was able to get the kids’ sizes, their style and color preferences,” he said. “Because they had some input into a new item of clothing, I think they’ll take some ownership of it and some pride in it.”
Travis Bryant, executive director of the Bangor agency, said Thursday that Sobel’s donations were a “tremendous amount of help” to the families the organization serves.
“His passion to help others is greatly appreciated,” Bryant said.
Since Sobel began accepting donations in exchange for plowing and shoveling, he has taken in about $500 in donations, which will buy more winter gear for more kids, he said.
In addition to helping foster kids, Ryker and his dad helped out a canine in need during an unexpected encounter while driving to a plowing job earlier this week.
“We were in a pretty remote area and the first thing we saw from the windows was a couple of owls,” Sobel said. “Ryker is telling me everything he knows about owls, when I see a pair of eyes peering out of a snow bank.”
Those eyes belonged to a dog stuck in the snowbank. Sobel pulled over, and the shivering dog let him carry her into the warm truck.
“She was cold and in a tough spot,” Sobel said. “My son lent her his blanket to help her warm up.”
The dog did not have a tag identifying its owner, so Sobel drove from house to house looking for the owner.
“We found them at the second house we went to, and the owners were very thankful,” he said. “She apparently broke her lead and was lost. If we hadn’t been out there, I don’t know if that dog ever would have been found.”
It was one more example of how people can be better.