- Mark Wasserman and his wife, Sue Gurland, with several of the collections boxes decorated by area children at home in Boca Raton.
A Boca Raton man’s dream: To help the homeless
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
His dream was so real, so powerful that Mark Wasserman couldn’t go back to sleep.
For days, he had been trying to think of a new way to raise money to help homeless families in Palm Beach County, the focus of his volunteer efforts since retiring. Then, a bolt of inspiration woke him at 4 a.m. in his Boca Raton home.
“You want to hear my brilliant idea?” he whispered to his sleeping wife, Sue Gurland.
“I knew my husband well enough that if I didn’t listen then, he was going to be up all night tossing and turning – and not letting me sleep,” she said, laughing. “So I figured I’d better listen.”
In the twilight, Wasserman explained that he had imagined a plain house-shaped cardboard piggy bank – something like a Happy Meal – that children could decorate and place in their homes and around the community to collect loose change.
It could be a fun arts-and-crafts project that could teach children a much bigger lesson about the issue of homelessness.
Gurland hopped out of bed and flipped on her computer where she found not only that no one else had thought of this concept, but that they could order such boxes cheaply online. A simple but impactful idea was born.
