Apr 22, 2013 4 min read

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Twice a year, the children at Wylandville Elementary School organize a project to help a local charity.

When Christy Hessler, a pharmacist at Giant Eagle and parent of two children who attend the Canon-McMillan elementary school, found out that a colleague volunteered with WeCare Street Outreach, an organization that provides medical and basic wellness care to the unsheltered homeless in Washington County, she knew she found a cause the students could rally around.

Hessler volunteered with the City Mission in middle school and high school, and saw firsthand the challenges homeless men and women face.

“Seeing what they go through changes your life. When you see people who have literally nothing, it’s an eye-opener,” said Hessler. “I want the kids to be aware of that.”

For a week leading up to Christmas, 200 students in kindergarten through fourth grade collected socks, gloves, hats, scarves, granola bars, cough drops and lip balm to put in boxes that were delivered to the homeless. Some of the children made greeting cards.

At the end of the week, about 50 fourth-graders assembled the boxes for the men and women they had never met who had fallen on hard times.

Grassroots efforts like Wylandville Elementary’s are a boost to area agencies that help the homeless, and several Washington County groups and organizations have pitched in over the years.

“It’s huge,” said Laura Vincenti, executive director of Family Promise of Southwestern Pennsylvania. “It provides much-needed resources and supplies for us. All of us who are working with the homeless are a skeleton, and when somebody steps up and completes a project that we don’t have an ability to pay for, it’s enormous.”

At Chartiers Hill United Presbyterian Church, a group called the Mat Makers knits sleeping mats for the homeless from plastic bags. It takes about 500 to 700 bags – and more than 30 hours – to make one waterproof mat. The mats are donated to the City Mission and Operation Safety Net in Pittsburgh. Country Meadows employees also have made mats.

A ninth-grader at Upper St. Clair, Hannah Wilding, has organized a project with her Youth Sewing Ministry at St. Louise de Marillac Catholic Church for Family Promise. The group is making tote bags, and the seventh-grade religious education classes there will fill the totes with toiletries. The sewing group also has made blankets for families at Family Promise.

Those acts of kindness often make the homeless struggling to get back on their feet realize that they are not alone, and can make their journey toward independence less difficult.

Volunteering for WeCare has given Mallory Rogers, a junior at Trinity High School, a different perspective of the homeless.

After spending time with the homeless men and women at WeCare, Rogers was struck by how much they had in common with her friends and family. During conversations, they would show her pictures of their grandchildren, talk about the Pittsburgh Steelers and Penguins, and share stories about their hopes and how they ended up homeless.

Like Hessler, Rogers organized a drive, sponsored by the junior class, for WeCare at Christmastime. For a month-and-a-half, students brought in jeans, sweatshirts, hand warmers and other items, and placed them in collection boxes set up in the math teachers’ classrooms.

She, too, wants to raise awareness about the plight of the homeless.

“I always knew there were homeless people, but I didn’t realize how close to me they lived. I don’t think many students realize that,” said Rogers. “The biggest thing I learned has been not to look at the face value of something. You have to look beneath the surface of the homeless.”