Buckley Man Honored at White House for Community Service

A Buckley man has received the White House’s top honor for volunteer community service, according to a press release issued Wednesday by the Machinists Union District Lodge 751.

Tom Lindberg is a retired Boeing employee and member of the Machinists Union. He received a gold-level President’s Volunteer Service Award, which is the top award given by the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation.

The gold-level awards go to volunteers who give more than 500 hours of their time to community service in a year.

“There is nothing so satisfying to the spirit than giving our all to a difficult task,” President Obama said in a letter to the award-winners. “Your volunteer service demonstrates the kind of commitment to your community that moves America a step closer to its great promise.”

Lindberg is a member of the Machinists Volunteer Program (MVP), which is the community service arm of Machinists Union District Lodge 751 in Seattle. He was one of five union volunteers to receive gold-level volunteer awards this year.

They were honored by the lodge’s District Council at its meeting March 13. The group also was picked to attend President Obama’s speech at Boeing’s Everett factory on Feb. 17, where they were recognized for their volunteer work by Tom Buffenbarger, the international president of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers.

Click here to read the Machinists News item about the day's events.

As a group, District 751’s MVPs gave more than 10,000 hours of volunteer service in 2011, which means the union itself is a gold-level presidential award-winning organization.

The union members volunteers in support of groups like Guide Dogs of America, Northwest Harvest and the Salvation Army. They also volunteered regularly in the kitchens of homeless shelters in Everett and Tacoma, and built seven wheelchair ramps for homebound people around Puget Sound.

The MVP group specialized in building such wheelchair ramps, District 751 spokesman Bryan Corliss said. Lindberg also spent time helping out at the Tacoma Rescue Mission, he said.

District 751 President Tom Wroblewski praised all the union MVPs for their volunteer work in 2011, and singled out Lindberg and the other gold-level award winners in particular.

“Our union has two missions: to make our companies better places to work, and make our communities better places to live,” he said. “Tom and the other gold-level winners have gone above and beyond in their efforts to build better communities here in our corner of America.”

District 751 represents more than 31,000 working men and women at 45 employers across Washington, Oregon and Canada including The Boeing Company and Joint Base Lewis McChord.