One chilly fall night in 2014, on a joyride gone awry, teenagers plowed an SUV into the glass door of a bottom floor apartment in Leesburg, VA. The family who lived in the apartment was understandably distressed. Two preschoolers, a boy and a girl, were crying and wanted to go back into their home. The parents were visibly agitated.
Carol McKenzie, who joined the Red Cross as a volunteer in 2007, arrived on the scene at 10 p.m. as a fairly new DAT (Disaster Action Team) lead responder. She arranged a place for the family to stay, wrapped the children in blankets and gave them Mickey Mouse stuffed toys to distract them from their tears. Most important, perhaps, Carol gave the family something quintessentially ‘Red Cross.’
“I had a calm, collected manner, which is what people in a disaster need,” Carol says. “They were upset. Sometimes another person who is quiet and calm and not distracted by the emergency can really help.”
Carol, 66, is the disaster lead for Loudoun County, VA, meaning she responds to calls for help with home fires, floods and other emergencies. She is also on call 24/7. Disaster leads in Prince William County, VA back her up and she, in return, backs up those volunteer leads when someone is unavailable to respond.
“We all try to help each other out,” Carol says. “When you’re working in a situation that’s highly charged, you come to rely on other people. We’re all in this together.”
Fortunately, Carol says, Loudoun County has a relatively low incidence of house fires, which frees up her time to volunteer for other Red Cross needs. Among her projects, she coordinates the Loudoun and Prince William Counties’ home fire campaigns, known as Sound the Alarm.
Since 2016, Carol and her group of Red Cross volunteers have made monthly visits to neighborhoods considered at-risk for home fires, including immigrant communities and neighborhoods with older construction. Carol gets community leaders involved by asking them to alert residents that the Red Cross is coming. During the Saturday visits, volunteers go door-to-door, installing free smoke alarms and providing fire safety information, such as fire escape plans.
Despite all her volunteering, Carol finds time to run her own organizing business. She helps clients get rid of clutter from mounds of papers to closets full of old belongings, and helps them better organize their time. She also manages a neighbor’s business. Still, Carol says, she’s not running at full steam.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, Carol underwent what seemed like an endless round of surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. She was too sick to work and is still regaining her energy, she says. She would have loved to have joined the more than 100 Red Cross volunteers from the National Capitol Region who deployed to California, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands in the wake of recent hurricanes, floods and wildfires, but didn’t feel she was strong enough yet. She hopes to deploy to a disaster sometime in the next two years.
Cancer brought her even closer to her fellow volunteers. While she was too sick to work or volunteer, fellow volunteers kept tabs on her, regularly checking in to see how she was doing. When you join the Red Cross, you join a community, she says.
“It meant a lot when I wasn’t able to participate in volunteering to have that contact,” McKenzie says. “It was important to me and to my recovery.”
Carol, who lives in rural Lovettsville, VA, with her cats Jet, Marmalade and Ms. Engine, was inspired by her mother to volunteer. Her father was an officer in the Navy, and she and her two younger brothers were raised in Cuba, Italy and Japan. Her mom, who died in 2012, volunteered for the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and countless military causes. She frequently taught her daughter how to contribute to the benefit of her family as well as others.
“My mother was quite the volunteer,” Carol recalls. “Always modest about her service, she’d often say that just a little bit of time can make a huge difference.”
Carol is now trying to pass on the volunteer bug to her son, Matthew, 28, who lives in Ashburn, VA. She tells him how blessed they are and how important it is to give back. He helps when she takes on a project that weighs more than she can handle, such as organizing cases of DAT supplies.
“He’s not a Red Cross volunteer yet,” Carol says with a big smile, “but I’m working on it.”
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