At her daughter’s soccer tournament on a September Saturday, Bridget Kent was talking with a friend when the topic turned to the high price of heating oil. In the past five years, the cost to fill the tank at Kent’s Westford home has gone from $500 to $1,200. She reserves oil to heat her hot water and relies on a woodstove to heat her 900-square-foot home.
Kent, a 43-year-old single mom, keeps her thermostat at 58 degrees. She typically burns six cords of wood each winter but last year could afford only four.
Coincidentally, after the tournament ended, a soccer coach happened to mention that she was heading off to volunteer at Wood4Good. That’s how Kent learned about the Jericho nonprofit that gives away firewood.
“You should apply,” Kent’s friend told her.
The next morning, Kent filled out Wood4Good’s one-page online application, clicked “submit” and thought, Yeah, right.
That evening, her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, so she didn’t answer. Then she got a text: “Hi, Bridget, it’s Dave with Wood4Good here at your home to deliver your wood.”
“I went outside, and I looked, and I just started crying,” Kent said. Wood4Good volunteer David Lawson was there with a white truck carrying more than a cord of firewood.
Jericho resident Eric Axelrod started Wood4Good with his two sons in late 2019 — he had extra firewood in his backyard and decided to give it away. It’s now a nonprofit, with a woodlot on donated land in Jericho and distribution sites in St. Albans, Middlesex and Jeffersonville. Supported by monetary donations and an army of boots-on-the-ground volunteers, Wood4Good has helped as many as 150 families a winter.
“We could be statewide easily,” Axelrod said, though that would require raising money to hire an executive director. Axelrod works full time at a recruiting firm he founded called Pinnacle Search Professionals.
He was experiencing his own hard times when he started the wood bank. “I was recently divorced,” he said. Cutting and splitting firewood became his hobby. “It requires your full concentration to do the work, so you can’t be in your own head.” His backyard became “a sea of firewood,” so he offered to give it away on Front Porch Forum. His sons, Devin, then 13, and Logan, 10, helped deliver.
One recipient offered them the downed trees in her yard, which were already dry and ready to burn. “It was a night right before Christmas, and we were out there, cutting and splitting the wood under lights,” Axelrod said. They would give that wood away, too. “After we finished, Devin said, ‘You know, Dad, I think I want to do this every day.'”
That was the spark. Axelrod had been looking for “a higher-purpose project” for his kids, he said, and he found it.
Thirty-five percent of Vermont households reported burning cordwood in winter 2018-19. Nearly two-thirds relied on it as their primary heat source, burning, on average, nearly six cords each. A cord of wood — a stack that is four feet high, four feet wide and eight feet long — sells for $300 to $500. Heating a home for one winter can cost $3,000.
The state offers fuel assistance to Vermonters who meet income eligibility requirements, but wood banks, such as Wood4Good, tend to ask fewer questions. These independent organizations, dotted around the state, give firewood to neighbors in need. The Agency of Natural Resources lists six in its online wood bank directory.
In Addison County, the Starksboro wood bank offers only emergency assistance, enough wood to last a few days. The nonprofit New Community Project runs the operation, and the town donates space.
The Monkton Wood Bank started in 2008, when the 16 landowners of the 115-acre Little Hogback Community Forest, who cut wood for their own use, began chopping a couple of extra cords to give away. The organizers would hear about someone in a jam and add a cord to their woodpile anonymously. Sometimes they left a note.
“A lot of the people we delivered to were people who had been very active in the community or volunteering at the school or whatever and just hit hard times,” said John McNerney, who co-runs the wood bank. “So we’d actually, strangely, leave a thank-you note for … all of their efforts for the community.”
The operation remains informal, relying on referrals and not asking a lot of questions, but other area residents now donate most of the wood and help process it.
The United Way of Lamoille County’s Firewood Project gives a cord of wood to income-eligible veterans, seniors and families and encourages them to help with the program, if they are able. The operation relies on volunteers to cut, split and load donated wood, much of which has come from the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. In 2023 and 2024, the state set aside a total of 270 cords to donate to wood banks, according to state lands manager Jim Duncan.
Wood4Good is awaiting its first-ever donation from the state. Most of its wood is now donated by DJ’s Tree Service in Colchester and Barrett’s/SavATree in South Burlington. Mammoth logs — 16 to 20 feet long — sit just inside the drive at the woodlot. Peaked mountains of firewood ring the perimeter.
Every weekend, weather permitting, the lot comes alive when volunteers show up to help split, pile and load firewood onto trucks. They wrap small bundles to be sold to support the operation. Some, including Pete Davis, are regulars. The tall, wiry 67-year-old Jericho man, who runs his own one-man tree service, shows up in chaps and industrial hearing protectors. He was an Axelrod recruit.
“If you keep me in sharp chains,” he told Axelrod, “I’ll saw for you.”
Devin, now 18, and Logan, 15, still help when extracurricular activities allow, as do Axelrod’s stepkids Ivy Ondrack, 13, and Leo Ondrack, 17. His new wife, Sharon Sehdev, pitches in, too.
Workers from the Junior League of Champlain Valley helped on a recent Saturday. The following morning, a dozen members of the Rotary Club of Burlington took their turn. They ranged in age from 6-year-old Zander Tabaruka, whose dad, David, is a Rotarian, to 86-year-old Peter Hawks. As they left, six Mount Mansfield Union High School students arrived, one toting an ax.
Smoke rose from a small bonfire. Chain saws whined, and many hands, clad in work gloves, lined up log rounds to be split, then tossed onto conveyor belts. Logan’s friend Foster Pease, 14, worked with them. A trip to the woodlot, he knows, is part of the accommodation package when you sleep over at the Axelrod house.
Volunteer David Lawson was not on the lot that day. He just makes deliveries. Some recipients aren’t home when he drops off wood. Others meet him with hugs, gratitude and, sometimes, a story. Some have just had surgery or lost a job. Others are widows whose husbands used to split their firewood. If kids are in the family, he lets them push the button that tips the truck bed to dump the wood.
Asking for help isn’t easy, Lawson knows. He and his wife needed help paying their heating oil bills when they had a young family. They were renting the lower level of a house “that I swear was made of Swiss cheese,” he said.
Devin and Logan accompanied their dad on lots of deliveries in Wood4Good’s early days. They remember seeing empty woodpiles and hearing at least one recipient call the firewood they brought the best Christmas present he’d ever received.
The experience gives Logan something, too. “It brings meaning to my life,” he said.
“When I lay down in my bed at night and I’m thinking about what I did in the day,” he said, “I know that I didn’t waste my day.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Seasoned Greetings | Jericho’s Wood4Good delivers firewood to families in need”
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This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2024.
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