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General Information: Overview: Press Clips: Adirondack chairs

Social Enterprise

Inmates convert trees to chairs

Thursday, March 08, 2007 By MIKE PLAISANCE

SPRINGFIELD - It's a recycler's dream.

adirondack

Crews haul dead trees from around the city to Forest Park.

Inmates on a work program from the county jail have been using a sawmill at the park to turn the trees into planks.

The planks will be sent to the jail where inmates will fashion them into Adirondack chairs.

The chairs and other items will be sold in a program aimed at helping homeless people and inmates with nowhere to go once their sentences are done.

"It's reusing the resources," Patrick J. Sullivan, director of the city Parks, Recreation and Buildings Management Department, said yesterday.

The woodcutting and planned chair-making are part of the effort known as Pathmakers Partnership, intended to help the homeless and former inmates.

The partnership consists of a sheriff, a Zen master and an entrepreneur.

Hampden County Sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr., Bernie T. Glassman of the Zen Peacemakers in Montague and E. Joseph Sibilia Jr. of the Gasoline Alley Foundation on Albany Street have been working on homeless-helping plans for about a year.

The Adirondack chairs will be sold for $50 to $100 each on an eBay store that is being set up and will be called Pathmakers III, said James Daikan Bastien, chief operating officer of the Zen Peacemakers at the Maezumi Institute in Montague. Glassman founded the institute in 2005.

The chairs also might be sold locally at a bricks-and-mortar store, he said.

Money from the sales of the chairs and other items that the inmates make, such as uniforms and other clothing and metal works - the goal is to raise $100,000 - will be used to establish a company, he said.

That company, he said, will employ former inmates and homeless people who will make the same items.

The Pathmakers Partnership also is planned to include a 40- to 60-unit residence for homeless people and just-released inmates. Bastien said in February that three sites here are being considered.

Ashe said the heart of the effort is taking people who might otherwise lack direction and channeling their energy into work and other opportunities, and Sullivan has been a big help.

"He's way ahead of everybody in terms of energy, creativity, resourcefulness and competence," Ashe said.

Sullivan said inmate work crews have been using the portable sawmill at Forest Park for about four to six weeks. The maples, oaks and pines they send through the mill were cut down because they were too big or a safety hazard, he said.

Sullivan credited John C. Bilodeau, his department's head carpenter, with help in the trees-to-chairs venture.


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