- December 23, 2024
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In 2013, Mark Coates, a longtime woodworker and former mechanic, began to build a workshop behind his home in east Manatee County, near the Braden River. A retiree, he wanted “to have a place to putz around in,” he says. “As I was designing and building it, it just got bigger and bigger. I ended up thinking that I wanted to make it big enough so that if I sold my house, someone with a motor home or big boat could store it inside. Those were my thoughts. The Lord had different plans.”
These days, that roomy workshop is where a cadre of about 30 volunteers turn up on the first Saturday of each month to build parts for beds. Not just any beds. Twin beds and bunk beds earmarked for kids — kids who don’t have beds. Kids who sleep on couches and air mattresses. “Some are just sleeping on a pile of dirty clothes,” Coates says, “or just on the floor itself.”
On other Saturdays, Coates and a different group of volunteers deliver the bed parts to homes, where the children — usually younger than 10 — are encouraged to help assemble the pieces into a brand new place for them to sleep. The slats have Bible verses painted on them.
Coates, 72, is co-founder and president of Beds For Kids, which provides free beds, mattresses and bedding for children in Manatee and Sarasota counties. The project started as a small mission of the First Methodist Church in Bradenton in 2017, and as word got out about the need for beds, and requests piled up, the organization, based in Lakewood Ranch, incorporated in 2021 and received its 501 (C) (3) nonprofit status.
Beds for Kids delivered 203 beds in 2022 and 383 in 2023. Coates says the nonprofit is on pace to provide more than 500 this year. That’s a good news/bad news scenario. The charity has been impressively productive in its mission. But it can’t quite keep up with demand. That so many children in Manatee/Sarasota need something as basic as a bed to sleep on is hard to fathom.
Coates is reticent to talk about his background — not due to privacy, but because it’s “really not about me,” he says emphatically. “It’s about what the Lord’s doing and how the Lord is providing for all of this.”
Nevertheless, Coates reveals he grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana; was a diesel mechanic for several years; then ran a bar/restaurant for 28 years. He moved to Bradenton in 2007. “It was rather laid back here at the time,” he says. “I guess that’s what I liked about the area.”
Coates’s wife of 52 years, Brenda, is actively involved in Beds For Kids.
The all-volunteer organization receives requests for beds from government and nonprofit agencies, and schools. Most of the recipients are single mothers, but the organization also provides them to single fathers and some families.
And then there are the outliers. Like Tim Frost.
Frost’s childhood friend died in 2015. He offered to take his late friend’s three sons in for the summer of 2022. Frost was 41, divorced, and living alone in a two-bedroom condo in Bradenton. He needed beds and he needed them fast. Frost works with at-risk youngsters in the nonprofit realm, which is how he heard about Beds For Kids and made his request. “Within a week or two, the beds came,” he says. “Mark came with his granddaughter and put them together. [Otherwise], I guess the boys would have slept on air mattresses. I couldn’t afford three beds.”
Coates says Beds For Kids does not do much active fundraising. This year’s expenses amounted to $72,000 and the charity raised that much. Regardless, he leaves the money matters to others in the organization. “I told them, ‘All I want to do is build and deliver beds,” he says, then adds, “When someone donates money toward a bed, it goes to the bed.”
Coates says the lumber is donated by a company that wishes to remain anonymous. He buys bedding from Walmart, although a company donated several hundred sets last year, and the nonprofit is still using them. The biggest cost incurred by Beds For Kids is mattresses. “Mattress Firm gave us a really nice price,” Coates says. “I order them out of Texas at the corporate level. They’ll send 50, 75, a hundred mattresses at a time.”
After all the nuts and bolts of sourcing materials, running monthly build days and other tasks are completed, then comes the payoff: delivering and assembling the beds with the kids, and setting up the bedding, which includes spreads with brightly colored designs. Women in church groups donate teddy bears, handmade quilts and prayer mats. The children are also given an age-appropriate Bible and storybooks.
“The kids are so proud when they build the beds,” Coates says. The nonprofit’s Facebook page (Beds for Kids Inc. Serving Manatee and Sarasota Counties) includes dozens of photos of children fitting together wood pieces, screwing in screws and smiling brightly as they lie on their new beds.
Coates sometimes detects wariness from the adults. “A lot of these homes we go into, they don’t really understand the unconditional love you’re bringing into their home,” he says. “It sometimes takes a minute, but it overwhelms them.”
