Dr Slosberg, Bread for the City super volunteer

Dr. Bernard Slosberg has been a familiar face around here for 13 years now. One of our most dedicated and effective volunteers, Dr. Slosberg has been working two volunteer shifts a week in our medical clinic since retiring in 2001.

In addition to providing care to our patients, Dr. Slosberg has mentored scores of younger doctors, medical students, and residents. He even took a course at Johns Hopkins about teaching medical students, and in fact eventually ended up teaching that very course himself.

After years of volunteering, Dr. Slosberg and his wife are now also donors to Bread for the City – and they manage their giving in several different ways: through a charitable remainder trust, a charitable gift annuity, and a donor advised fund. These gifts are also partially matched through Dr. Slosberg’s former employer. Bread for the City is also a beneficiary in his final will and testament (though these funds we don’t expect to receive for a long time).

“I would like to change the whole system,” he says of his commitment to helping those less fortunate, “but I’m realistic enough to know that I can’t do that. So I do what I can. Life has been very, very good to me so I’m trying to give something back.”

And so yesterday was a bittersweet one here at Bread for the City, when Dr. Slosberg “graduated” from our medical clinic. He won’t be a stranger from here on out – he will be joining us for the Groundbreaking of our Northwest Center expansion, and he is looking forward to see the expansion of our medical clinic firsthand.

“The medical clinic in the last five years has made such major progress – great new staff, automated record-keeping, new procedures, and they’re going to be so effective in the new clinic. When this expansion is done, they’ll able to stretch out and really settle in, and it will make all this so much more effective. They’re on a great trajectory.”

Right when I asked him about his fondest memory of working here at Bread for the City, a little boy ran into the room; the boy looked at Dr. Slosberg for a moment, waved, and turned around to run out. Bernard sighed and said with a smile, “every day.”