Left Hand Laurel Susan Odiseos

Susan Odiseos has been an active volunteer in the Niwot community since she moved here in December 2018, including organizing food drives, participating with the Niwot Patriotic Cookie Moms, working at Rock & Rails, and being an active member of the Niwot Community Connection (NCC). Odiseos has had a lifetime of community involvement that has changed lives.

Odiseos originally lived in Connecticut, and assisted several charity and volunteer organizations there before she moved to Santa Fe around 2007. Eleven years later, she moved to Niwot to be closer to her son and his family.

"I was a volunteer at the head of a food drive called Feeding Santa Fe, and I had a lot of people helping, but no one wanted more responsibility," Susan said about her decision to move to Niwot. "So I was kind of tired, but I'm not a quitter so I didn't want to leave until I had gotten things up to where I felt they should be before leaving. I was raising money, I was ordering food, I was talking to school and church groups."

Odiseos has been a part of the NCC for almost as long as she has been in Niwot. She joined when she met Dawn Server, who is one of the founders of the NCC and has been working on volunteer opportunities all around Niwot with them ever since.

One of the major projects that Odiseos organized in Niwot is a local food drive in early 2020, working alongside the NCC. The drive was originally intended to be a one-time event. However, COVID had escalated the need for local food drives and it was clear that help was still needed throughout the pandemic. Odiseos was up to the challenge of running a charity food drive to help people through the rough years of the pandemic.

"So I connected with the Our Center in Longmont, and I do a monthly food drive," Odiseos explained. "And the people from the NCC contribute to that and that's been a very wonderful thing that we do every single month. I have to tell you, when I first thought of the idea, I didn't even know what COVID was going to be like. I thought it would be a one-time event, and we've been doing it every month since then."

The food drive is still up and running monthly to this day and has delivered thousands of pounds of non-perishable food to those in need. The food drive runs out of St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church in Gunbarrel and is one of their many programs to help those in need.

She also volunteers with the Niwot Patriotic Cookie Moms who bake cookies for care packages to be sent to military members overseas. She is currently working to help prepare cookies in honor of a Veteran's Day event this November, honoring our local heroes.

Odiseos has also volunteered at Rock & Rails for the past two years, helping the concert run smoothly and subsequently helping the charities associated with the free summer concert series. She is currently planning other potential volunteer projects to help advocate for local history to be more present in schools.

Before she moved to Niwot, Odiseos was the head of the Red Cross Blood Program in her Connecticut community, and she worked with the Midnight Run group, based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, which helps supply homeless people with necessities and helps connect the homeless with the housed to create a more healthy caring community. Odiseos served as the Executive Director of Just One Break, a non profit founded by Eleanor Roosevelt to help people with disabilities find sustainable employment.

"Like most volunteers, I'm not doing it for recognition," Odiseos said about why she chose to do so many volunteering and charity events throughout her life. "Laura Snyder, my grandmother, she was my role model, she volunteered and taught kids how to embroider. Another inspiration was back when I was in Connecticut, I was the head of the Red Cross Blood Program. It was inspiring to know that people were going so far as to donate their own blood to help people they don't even know."

In Santa Fe, Odiseos was the founding chairman of the Interface Shelter for the Homeless, founding chairman of the Interfaith Community Shelter, president of Feeding Santa Fe, a drive-thru food pantry, and started a program to provide food for low income mothers attending high school.

"I feel that [Niwot is] a community that is so generous and so giving," said Odiseos, "I'm on Facebook and just seeing how people are coming together to help with all the disaster in North Carolina and Georgia. I said, hopefully, it'll never happen here, but if it does, the Niwot community will be there to help each other because that's the fabric of the community we're in, reaching out and helping others. When you volunteer to help others, you get as much, if not more, of what you give because it's the joy of working with others who are like-minded. It's wonderful."