Next month, every day leading up until Christmas the Strathmore Overnight Shelter will be highlighting ways the community can help out with their ’25 Ways in 25 Days’ campaign.
The shelter is completely run on the generosity of donors and the community. This campaign works to expand the shelter’s relationship with the community.
Each day the social media campaign reveals a different way people can support less fortunate people in their community.
’25 Ways in 25 Days’ gives individuals 25 easy ways to support the shelter from volunteering to donating items to increasing awareness, and knowledge about homelessness.
“The community has been absolutely amazing in their responses and so we thought we would get specific with what we needed, and put it out there with 25 Days,” said Executive Director Elizabeth Karp.
She explained that the campaign allows the shelter to be more specific about things that they need, which typically don’t get donated to the shelter. But to also inform the community about challenges faced by homeless people.
“We can be really specific about what we need, like we need plastic utensils and stuff like that that people don’t think about, and certainly food items like lunch meats,” she said.
“Christmas is difficult when you have nowhere to be,” she said. Karp explained that it’s important to just have volunteers come in and spend a little bit of time with people at Christmas. “We’re trying to decorate, and bring some cheer and love into the place for that,” she explained.
“Strathmore is a community where people of all ages and abilities come together to help one another, and we wanted to celebrate that with our Christmas campaign,” Karp explained.
Overnight shelter volunteers have given over 6,000 hours of time this year for intake and overnight shifts.
Expanding in the new year
“We were running at full capacity for a large portion of time since the summer. We’ve had all of our inspections and everything is done, and now we are looking to double our capacity for next year,” said Karp.
The shelter hopes to expand the facility in order to accommodate 20 clients in the new year.
Originally published on Wednesday, 27 November 2019 by Strathmore Now. Written by Monique Massiah.
