Listen to a recent interview with our Founder

Our Founding Story

-- by Layne Amerikaner, former Development Associate

Dr. Mark Bergel’s life holds little resemblance today to what it was only nine years ago.  In 2001, Mark spent his days teaching and leading workshops on health and wellness at local universities and corporations. Today, leading an organization that the Catalogue for Philanthropy calls “one of the finest small charities Greater Washington has to offer,” Mark’s activities can range from meeting with political and business leaders to hoisting couches onto the pick-up trucks of local families in need. Though his organization has already served more than 53,000 children and adults – including the provision of urgently needed beds, dressers, cribs, and more to families across the region – Mark does not go to sleep each night on a bed of his own.  Rather, he ends his often 17-hour workdays by collapsing onto his couch or floor, pledging to not sleep in a bed until every child and adult in the country has a bed on which to sleep.

How did this incredible shift come to be?

Nine years ago, Mark began requiring that his students at American University perform community service work.  As he and his class immersed themselves in the region’s social service world, he quickly became aware that though there were many organizations doing important work, the needs still greatly outweighed the response.  Apartment after apartment, Mark saw parents raising children in homes with no beds, no dressers, and no living room or dining room furniture at all. He spoke with family after family living with little or no access to information and resources readily available to others throughout our communities. He then met with shelter managers and heard their pleas for educational programs on topics such as stress management, nutrition, and other life skills.

With no seed money but a strong conviction that we could do better for those living in poverty - that we could end it - Mark decided to drop everything else in his life and converted his living room into a nonprofit office.  He founded A Wider Circle with the mission of helping children and adults lift themselves out of poverty.  His goal was to create an organization that would address “the whole person” – with programs that would not only tend to people’s tangible needs but also to their “inner needs.”

Using donated furniture and a handful of dedicated volunteers and health professionals, A Wider Circle furnished the homes of 774 children and adults and delivered 33 educational workshops at local shelters in its first year of service.  Today, operating out of a new Center for Community Service in Silver Spring, Maryland, A Wider Circle has eighteen staff members, twenty-five university interns, and hundreds of volunteers. It is their energy and commitment that allows A Wider Circle to now furnish the homes of more than 12,000 children and adults each year and deliver educational programs to thousands of men, women and children.

Mark has been known to say that “as one of us goes, so go all of us.”  Though this is a powerful idea that many of us espouse, few of us live and breathe it each day.  Mark’s pledge to give up his own bed means that he can say to the hundreds of men and women calling each day who have been sleeping for years on the bare floor, “I know how hard it is” – and mean it.

One of these individuals was a woman named Alexis, who called A Wider Circle for help and shared the following:  "I have been smiling from ear to ear all day long.  I am thanking God.  My kids and I are sleeping on the floor – they get up for school and they are tired.  My doctor says that I need to get up off the floor.  I was so happy when I called you… knowing that I would get the beds was the light at the end of the tunnel." 

In nine years of service, A Wider Circle has gone from an idea in the mind of one extraordinary individual to a powerful piece of the movement to end poverty.  Alexis and her children are now sleeping in beds in their fully furnished home – and A Wider Circle will continue with this work until every family can say the same.