Published: February 01, 2008 10:29 am            

VIDEO: Niagara Falls Community Mission tour

When Lynne Smith opened the door to her office on a recent birthday, Kiefer Sutherland was everywhere.

Images of the bad boy actor decorated the room, surreptitiously placed there by her colleagues to brighten her day.

Smith loves Sutherland, who plays a government agent on TV’s “24” and is noted for doing the impossible to save the planet.

That may be just the kind of unstoppable resolve Smith and her colleagues must call upon daily in their work at the Community Missions in Niagara Falls

The challenge is daunting, but Smith, an event planner for the mission, came to her post last year from a 17-year stint that required her to blend endless stamina with relentless optimism. She was a perfume sprayer at the mall.

“Yes, I was one of those annoying people in the mall who would squirt you with perfume,” she said, laughing lightly. Apparently, it was great work, paid well, and sometime required the wiles of a secret agent. But, even a fun job like that gets old after a while and Smith found herself looking for something new. The change she found was life-altering.

She took a job at the Community Missions in Niagara Falls — located on complex built by combining two old motels on Buffalo Avenue to create living spaces for the homeless and a soup kitchen for the hungry — and she began to work daily among the hundreds of people who had nowhere else to go.

“I was very surprised at the serious need for the mission’s services,” she said. “Whatever I imagined the need to be, it was double that. It’s a very humbling way to start your day.”

The work opened her eyes to the rewards found in helping others.

“The job is really good for me personally. It would be for anyone,” she said. Providing her children with the experience of helping others turned out to be even better perk than the job itself. Her daughter, Katie, 15, came to the mission with her friends and helped to paint a room for a homeless family. Her son Brian, 19, a dean’s list student at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, helped to deliver meals on Thanksgiving.

Smith finds that the best part of her job is sharing the mission experience with young people, including area high school students who come in to fulfill their community service obligations. “I just can’t get enough of that,” she said.

“You can talk and talk all you want about helping others, but it just doesn’t become real until someone serves someone else in the soup kitchen. They just need to see it and experience the humbleness of it.”

Humble or not, her efforts to fortify the mission through fundraising will be undertaken this year with images of Kiefer Sutherland looking over her shoulder. Smith likes that his character seems invincible as he works to save mankind. Smith just wants to brighten up her little corner of the world.

In fact, her experience at the perfume counters may be just the ticket in fortifying fundraising efforts, as the mission events seem to lean toward glamour. A recent art auction raised nearly $5,000 for the mission. An upcoming sweetheart dinner and basket auction planned for FridayFeb. 8 at the Crowne Plaza in Niagara Falls, is expected to be equally successful.

“I’m trying to help the mission shine,” she said.

Contact editor Michele DeLuca at 693-1000, ext. 157.

        

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