By CAROL PRZYBYLSKI

Special to The Gazette

I have always loved raising my family and living in Portage County, even though I am not “native” to this county as my husband is. The other thing I love is meeting new people and having them share their stories with me.

By writing this column for a year now, I have had the honor of meeting local folks as well as those who moved here for school, jobs, marriages, etc. This month I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Janice Doxtator who has lived here since 1962. It is her home now.

She came to Portage County through a journey that started in Kansas where she was born, to Santa Fe where she married and started her family and finally to Stevens Point where she added to her family. She furthered her education by commuting to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She held several jobs in Stevens Point and retired in 2002.

This is really where Doxtator’s story with RSVP started. Unlike others I have interviewed, Doxtator was already a volunteer before she retired and then asked to become a RSVP member doing the same job.

She realized that our program needs volunteers to continue meeting the criteria for grants that support us as well as all our great service that our 560-plus current volunteers provide. She may not have known that she didn’t really need to be retired to be a RSVP volunteer, just 55 years old or older. Lucky for us, she met both criteria when she joined.

Doxtater had been volunteering at the Riverfront Arts Center for a few years and learned that some of her friends working alongside of her were RSVP volunteers.

So, when she retired from her most recent job as a librarian with the Portage County Library she carefully chose other ways to keep busy and help others.

Doxtator told me from the start of our meeting that she always picked volunteer assignments that fit in her “comfort zone.” Besides her continuing services at the Riverfront Arts Center, she also became a tutor to elementary age school children who have shown how much they benefit from the one-on-one experience with our volunteers.

The lifetime hours so far are a staggering 1,572.5 and growing. That is a lot of service to our community and our children. She has primarily worked at Kennedy School in Junction City, but also at Jefferson and Bannach schools in Stevens Point.

She assisted in cataloging the reference library at the Lincoln Center where she put her lifetime skills to work.

In her spare time, she and her husband enjoy playing duplicate bridge (often at the Lincoln Center), knitting hats/gloves for low-income children, sewing and her passion of reading.

She has two grandsons who live out of state that she sees as often as possible. She is an amazing woman I would probably never have met if not for volunteering with RSVP.

I asked Doxtator, as I do all volunteers I write about, what she would say to others to encourage them to join us. Her response was that we “have a variety of programs/services to pick from and they should start with something they are comfortable with and go from there.”

We both agree the need for school tutors continues to grow. An hour or two a week might not seem like a lot to us, but it can mean the world to those we serve. So give us some consideration and call us at 715-346-1401 for more information. You too can become a part of an amazing program weaving a tapestry in Portage County.

Editor’s note: Carol Przybylski is a RSVP advisory board member.