What this actually looks like. Most of the work is a phone call and an invoice, which does not photograph well. These are the parts that do. Select any picture to read the full caption, or move through them with the arrow keys.
The photographs for this gallery have not been added yet. Each panel below holds its caption and its place in the layout, ready for the picture described.
Photograph to come First delivery of the season A hundred gallons going into a tank on Kearsarge Mountain Road in Warner, the morning after the call came in. Most of our deliveries are arranged the same afternoon and filled the next day. View caption Photograph to come Tuesday evening intake Two volunteers, two phones and a kitchen table. Intake runs on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and every caller speaks to a person rather than a voicemail box. View caption Photograph to come A ton and a half, stacked Pellets delivered to a household in Salisbury in November, early enough to fill the shed before the first hard freeze instead of buying by the bag all winter. View caption Photograph to come The Warmed Hearts thermometer The hand-painted goal board that stood in the window of Contoocook village through the winter of 2020 and 2021. It passed $40,000 in February and never came down until May. View caption Photograph to come Paid straight to the dealer We never hand out cash. Every dollar goes to a fuel company against a named invoice, which is how a fund this small stays trusted by both the households and the dealers. View caption Photograph to come Eleven volunteers, no staff The whole organisation, photographed after the spring meeting. Nobody here is paid, and the fund has no office, which is why almost every dollar donated reaches a tank. View caption Photograph to come Why we work year-round A road in Webster after the February ice storm. Cold emergencies are the ones people picture, but furnaces also fail in July, and we answer those calls too. View caption Photograph to come The general store collection The jar on the counter of a Contoocook shop, emptied every few weeks. It rarely holds more than sixty dollars and it has paid for a great many gallons. View caption Photograph to come Notes we were sent A handful of the cards that arrive each spring. We keep them in a box and read them aloud at the annual meeting, with the names taken off. View caption We photograph deliveries only where the household has said yes, and never in a way that identifies the house. That rule costs us some good pictures and we keep it anyway.