We should all do as Jaime Cassidy has done. Not everything, of course, but a little bit. Most of us are not going to spend 2½ years in El Salvador with the Peace Corps or go to Sierra Leone to work in a nutrition program with UNICEF.

But we can look more closely into the face of need. We can try for some perspective on what living with less really means.

“I know people can live with meager means and be happy,” says Cassidy.

She is in her office at the Salvation Army’s wonderful daycare center on Miner Street in South Providence. On a beautiful spring morning, the center is filled with the sounds of very young children being very young in a safe, caring place.

Earlier in April, the weather was not so beautiful. It was cold and wet and the problems Cassidy deals with did not stop because the calendar said spring.

In seven working days in early April, $55,549 in heating assistance was paid through the Salvation Army’s Good Neighbor Energy Plan.

“The great thing about the Salvation Army is that it doesn’t see things in black and white,” says Cassidy, who is director of social services at the Salvation Army. “It treats people as people. There are extenuating circumstances.”

There is, for one thing, heating oil at close to $4 a gallon. There is an economy going south. There are foreclosures. There are young children and old people and working families that just can’t afford to keep their homes even close to comfortable.

There were multiple space heaters and open ovens used for heat in some very cold houses this past winter.

“The intensity of the crisis is higher than before,” says Cassidy. “The desperation in people’s eyes is something I haven’t seen before.”

She hasn’t seen it here before. But she has seen desperation. She shows me pictures of children in Sierra Leone so malnourished that their wrinkled skin hangs from their tiny bodies.

She has been there. At 29, she has been to places where people know all about getting through a day with very very little. After Pilgrim High School in Warwick and Colby College in Maine, Cassidy went to the Peace Corps, to El Salvador, where she saw people living in ways that make it easy to understand why they would head north.

“You understand why they come to the United States to do better for their families.”

After the Peace Corps and UNICEF, after working as an HIV case manager for an agency in Taunton, Cassidy headed for Tulane University in New Orleans to get a master’s degree in public health. She got there just in time to be driven out by Hurricane Katrina. She headed back to New England and ended up getting a degree at Boston University.

Now, with all those lessons from the places she’s been, she sits at the center of things in South Providence, matching generosity to need.

Cassidy says she doesn’t know where the bottom is right now. On May 1, the moratorium on utility shutoffs ends, and there will be thousands of shutoffs in Rhode Island.

But there is a bright side. There really is. Cassidy looks at this season of hard times and hard decisions as a lesson in the things that truly matter.

The best thing to come out of this cold season, she says, is the way people have responded. Through individual and corporate donations and fundraisers, $700,000 was raised for the Good Neighbor Energy Fund this year.

“Here, I think this experience will help us come together as a community. I see people reaching out as never before.”

bkerr@projo.com