Community advocate delivers 5,000 free beds to Lincoln families

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Bryan Seck has held many roles in Lincoln while aiming to serve the community’s most urgent needs.

Currently, Seck is the Executive Director of Lincoln Literacy, but years ago, he worked as a homeless outreach coordinator for Lincoln Public Schools.

During that time, he noticed that families would get a new place to live but would have nowhere to sleep because they could not afford furniture.

Upon learning this, Seck sprang into action, hand-delivering bed frames and mattresses weekly; most recently, reaching 5,000 deliveries.

“I would work with a family, we’d help them get a new apartment, thanks to all the agencies here in town, and I’d see that they were sleeping on the floor, and it just drove me crazy,” said Seck.

It compelled him to reach out to community partners he knew would help, such as Spreetail, an e-commerce company that agreed to donate beds.

Seck said, the founder told him, “I got you the 30 beds you asked for, but you’ve got to get them out of the warehouse, so my next call was to Connie Duncan at Duncan Aviation to ask if I could use a hangar,” he said.

Duncan told Channel 8 that at the time of his inquiry, she had only used the hangers for aviation-related things, but “When Bryan asked, I thought we could make room for something like this,” she said.

Shortly after that, Spreetail would deliver beds to the hanger consistently and weekly, Seck would collect those beds and deliver them every Sunday to families he would be made aware of through referrals.

Seck remembers one family he delivered to: a mom and her three sons.

“They insisted on walking with me, carrying each frame and each bed into the house, and they just had their hands on the box, but they were so proud,” he said.

“They closed the door, and I said goodbye, and the little boy said, ” We have new beds! We don’t have to sleep on the floor anymore!”

Seck’s help doesn’t stop with beds.

He also co-founded an app, MyLNK, that pairs people with resources of all kinds, from Domestic Violence resources to daycare centers.

Like the beds, MyLNK took help from the community.

Garrett Swanson, a communications representative for the City of Lincoln, describes the app and website’s origins.

“‘Don’t Panic Labs’ helped put the website and the initial outline of the app together, a good Lincoln company, and then for a few years, they maintained it for free,” he said.

“Then a couple of years ago, the city and the county got involved, where we were going to pay half of the funds, and then half of the funds were going to come from a federal block grant, and that is now what is maintaining it.”

Seck says the best way to support this cause is to contribute to the organizations and businesses that partner with him, such as Spreetail, Duncan Aviation, the Lincoln Rotary Club, and Home in a Box through Messiah Lutheran Church.

If you would like to visit the MyLnk website, you can access it here or download it from the App Store.