When it comes to charities we often think of the common causes to donate our time, money, and clothes to: cancer, diabetes, and children’s hospitals. Growing up I’ve always been taught that if I can donate anything to help make a difference in someone’s life that I should because I’ve been fortunate to have been blessed with a better quality of life than some.
The one organization I choose to donate my old clothes to is Covenant House. Covenant House is an organization that operates as a homeless youth centre than not only provides shelter for homeless youth, but education centres, healthcare facilities, and job training.
When you think of a homeless person, you automatically think of an old man with a dirty face, torn clothes and a tattered beard. You don’t think of young people hopping from couch to couch at friends places, or the person kicked out of their home for dropping out of school.
In Canada alone there are an average of 40 thousand homeless sleeping on our streets, seven thousand of them are young people. Those aged 13-24 make up for 20% of Canada’s homeless population. And those statistics are even worse in other states and countries.
People who live on the streets often experience some form of violence within their first twelve months. They could become victims to physical or sexual assault, theft, or drug abuse.
The great thing that I love about Covenant House is that they welcome their doors to those who are at the beginning of their future lives and provide them the opportunity to develop themselves to get them to a better place.
They run individual workshops on resume building and interview skills, financial saving, and budgeting. They often welcome employers in to interview their candidates after training and provide them with professional clothes to help get them a job and have clothing to wear when they become employed. Unlike most homeless shelters, they don’t have a timeline of how long a resident can stay there, so their doors are open to as many people as they can provide for without a “kick out” day.
As millennials we can surely donate some of our old work clothes we no longer need and know it’s going to someone in the same boat as us; starting the rest of our lives. All locations can be found below:
If donating clothes either doesn’t seem enough or that it is not achievable based on distance from a location you can also help out by becoming a mentor to their residents, fundraise money via social media, or donate money yourself. You know it’s going towards valuable things such as toiletries, a new bed or food.
We can all appreciate how difficult it is to start our lives, especially without the support of our closest friends and families. Become the anonymous support someone desperately needs. It’s not hard to make a donation.
I love this. I recently visited San Diego in May all the way from Kansas. What I would consider homeless in Kansas, is nothing compared to the severity of the homeless population in the west coast. I had tears running down my face, my friend drove past blocks, miles long of communities of homeless people living under a blue tarp. My heart broke down; all these individuals have is a blue tarp covering them. They are not just a couple hundred, they are a community now. The blue tarp forever haunts me as this image was just a glimpse of how different regions in the world are brought together. San Diego was an eye-opener, that this issue, is a world-wide problem but we do not believe so. I relate this image towards our everyday lives; think of when we were young walking out of a grocery store or in a parking lot, we saw a dime or penny and kept it. Now as we get older, we let lose change fall and leave it for others, we are selfish to pick it up and assume that is our deed of the day. I am guilty of this too, I let the change stay there and hope that some kid gets excited and will pick it up. How lazy are we today in society that all this change, lose change, we are blinded by the amount of what we could be saving to help others; but we are so intrusive towards other things.