The modern need for professional organizers and the Container Store aside, it may be entirely possible to help change a person's life by spending a few hours arranging dress shirts by color or neatly folding a stack of children's jeans.

Nine members of the Trinity congregation and staff spent last Saturday in northeast Queens sorting clothes, organizing books, moving shelves and photographing antiques—all with the higher purpose of helping formerly incarcerated mothers keep their families intact and build new lives after prison.

The activities are part of Faith in Action's first New York City Mission & Service project, a series of four weekends in which members of the Trinity community will work with Hour Children, a program for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and their children.

Learn more about the New York Mission and Service Trip here.

Leila Hernandez, the weekend manager of the Fancy Clothes Thrift, asked parishioners Carmen Vasquez and Lina Lowry and Trinity staff member Anita Chan to arrange and fold clothing and books. When customers can find things easily, the store sells more, she said.

At Changes, an antique shop six blocks away, manager Maria Teresa Taussi directed Trinity staff member Jim Melchiorre and parishioner Joanne Malaspina to the paintings and china they could photograph for the store's website.

Some of the pieces are very valuable, Taussi said, pointing to a charcoal drawing and several sets of Dutch and German china. Hour Children won't receive the full value of the pieces if they stay in the shop, where they're priced at a fraction of what the same item in a Manhattan shop would bring. And local folks who buy at the shop can't afford to pay the true worth of the pieces. "We cannot sell a $900 lamp here," she said.

Just around the corner from the antique store, Regina Jacobs decided arranging furniture at The Attic furniture thrift was mutually beneficial for her and the shop. She and fellow parishioner Benjamin Johnson spent the morning moving shelves in the basement.

"I don't even think of it as volunteer work," Jacobs said. "I get back so much in the doing. I can't give enough. In the doing is the reward."

--Lynn Goswick

For more information about Trinity's Mission & Service trips--local, national, and abroad--contact Maggy Charles at mcharles@trinitywallstreet.org.