Help Sandy Get from Fire to Hope

This fundraiser is for Sandy Lucas, who, like me, participates in an on-line exercise class, through UVM, for cancer survivors. Over the years, starting with COVID, this class has become a real community, whose members care about and support each other.

So, we were shocked and saddened to hear that on May 3, a fire at Northern Meridian Senior Housing in South Burlington, Vermont, left Sandy, along with more than 50 other residents, homeless. For a few days, the landlord paid for a motel room and brought Sandy some essential things from her apartment, which is presently uninhabitable. After that, Sandy has been paying for her own motel room, which has already cost her more than she would otherwise be paying for May's rent. She is now in the process of moving, temporarily, to a "camp," in Colchester, Vermont, run by "Sister Pat," where she can stay only until the end of July. Eventually, Sandy hopes to move back into Northern Meridian, but the necessary repairs will take about a year.

In the meantime, she will need to rent a storage unit, pack and move her possessions there, find and pay for other housing, likely at a higher rent (which she can't afford), and again move her possessions first to her new interim housing and then, hopefully, back to Northern Meridian. Sandy cannot afford these large unanticipated expenses, which (excluding, for now, the additional cost, over her previous rent, of interim housing), I conservatively estimate to be about $6,000, the initial goal of this Go Fund Me. If, as is likely, Sandy cannot find affordable interim housing, this goal will be raised accordingly.

As a fellow cancer survivor, I deeply sympathize with Sandy's difficulty in dealing with her present emergency just five years after undergoing a second mastectomy and hopefully beating breast cancer. I hope you will join me in helping Sandy through her present ordeal.