Hometown hero Bozie Stearns has helped the homeless in Hartford for over 20 years.

Bozie Stearns is 85 years old, and he has been making weekly trips into Hartford to deliver van-loads full of bread and other baked goods for 20 years. He delivers bread that would have been discarded by the local grocery store to help feed the homeless at the McKinney Shelter in Hartford, and the East Hartford Family Shelter (both of those shelters are managed by the Community Renewal Team). He does this work simply because he knows it is the right thing to do.

As Bozie recently said: “If I can do something for someone else, it makes me feel really good. It keeps me going.” He added: “I try to treat everyone the way I would want to be treated.”

Thanks to his efforts, the McKinney Shelter has not had to buy bread for the past 20 years! CRT did an estimate of the amount of money that Bozie has personally saved the McKinney Shelter as a result of the bread he has donated to the shelter during this time – and this is just the loaves of bread, and does not include the other baked goods and stuff he gathers – it would be worth, conservatively, at least $327,000.

Wouldn’t it be nice if more people could “Be Like Bozie” and lend a hand to people in need? To find out more about how you can help the work of the Community Renewal Team, please visit: www.crtct.org.