At any given time, Michelle Rand is likely preparing for, working at or packing up from a volunteer activity. “I love this community. I’m a professional volunteer because I’m blessed to be able to do that,” she says.
Rand began volunteering at Torrance Memorial when her children started school. She loves to be of service, and the hospital was a natural fit. Her husband, David Rand, MD, an internal medicine and infectious disease physician, works there.
In 2004 Rand and her mother-in-law, an interior designer, teamed up to decorate a Christmas tree for Torrance Memorial’s annual Holiday Festival. Volunteers lavishly bedeck more than 30 themed trees to raise funds for the hospital. Michelle and Judith created A Beary Merry Christmas, featuring wooden bears. In 2005 the pair created a golf-themed tree as a tribute to Rand’s father-in-law, who had passed away that year.
“And that was it,” she says. “I joined the team under the direction of Carolyn Snyder, and it was off from there.” Rand joined the lead design team, which supports holiday tree designers and decorators and shops for unique decorations in Las Vegas at the annual Christmas Expo.
She says holiday event efforts happen year-round, given that volunteers work every Thursday at the warehouse to prepare for the event. That includes carefully wrapping and transporting trees and decorations to the event venue (the big white tent behind the hospital), decorating them on-site and breaking them down at the warehouse afterward.
The trees bring happiness even before the Holiday Festival begins. Rand recalls a woman watching the volunteers decorate the Heroes Tree in the Lundquist Tower lobby and asking if she could help. Her husband was undergoing surgery, and working with the decorations eased her mind.
A man who had just arrived from Hawaii helped for a bit and then thanked Rand. He’d come to pick up the belongings of his father, who had just passed away. “He said we made it nicer to sit while he waited,” she reports. “You never know whose life you’re going to touch.”
About a decade ago, Rand became one of the first three Santa’s helper elves, allowing her to interact more intimately with the community. “That’s my favorite role because I love people and how they react to me as an elf in that setting.” She also appears as an elf at the downtown Torrance Holiday Stroll, at a local Department of Children and Family Services Christmas event and at Community’s Child, a nonprofit organization serving homeless women and their children.
In addition, Rand volunteers for the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life, the nonprofit’s largest fundraiser of the year. “Torrance Memorial has been a sponsor of the relay since 2004, which is when I started,” says Rand, who has served as event lead, sponsorship chair and Torrance Memorial team captain.
When she’s not volunteering, Rand enjoys spending time with her 2½-year-old grandchildren (one local and one in Alabama). She also loves to garden and soak in the sun. It’s the one place she stops to let her batteries recharge before heading off to the next volunteer gig.
