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'Hats 4 Humanity'
St. John Bosco students collect hats for homeless
By Ambria Hammel, ahammel@catholicsun.org
November 20, 2008
Home is where you hang your hat, or so the saying goes. But what if you don’t have a home?
Well, according to St. John Bosco eighth-grader Lauren Rodrick, you still need a hat. She’s seeing to it that the Valley homeless have something covering their heads.
“Homelessness and hats were the first things that came to mind,” Rodrick said of the community service assignment she received last school year.
She got a youth group, two Catholic schools, three East Valley parishes and several community members behind the idea. “Hats for Humanity” was born.
Two months after school began, she’d collected some 1,300 summer and winter hats for homeless shelters around the Valley.
“They got pretty full really fast,” Rodrick’s friend Bridget Manning said of the collection bins she helped place at schools and parishes.
Another student Kayla Casey headed collection efforts at St. Mary-Basha School in Chandler. The students collected hats for two weeks and the school called Rodrick and Manning out three times to empty the donation bin.
Donors also filled the bin three times at St. Benedict Parish and twice at St. Andrew the Apostle Parish in Chandler. One St. Andrew parishioner filled two three-quart containers with hats that she knitted while at her ailing husband’s bedside.
The teenagers also received knitted caps from fellow parishioners living in senior centers who got their community involved.
The project at St. John Bosco was successful too. The more the girls talked up the drive in casual conversation, through the school’s weekly newsletter and daily announcements, the more the hats poured in.
Students competed among themselves to see who could bring in the most hats. They also participated in “hat days” when the students could wear a hat to school only if they donated it to “Hats for Humanity.”
Principal Shelley Conner recalled many students saying that they forgot to bring a hat on those special collection days. She encouraged the students to bring in a hat the next day or whichever day that they remembered.
“The homeless are still homeless, even if you didn’t bring one today,” Conner told the students.
The drive ended earlier this month with delivery to the shelters scheduled before Thanksgiving.
“There’s a lot of families that are homeless, not just adults,” Rodrick said. She was happy to get an assortment of baseball caps, knitted hats and other fashionable headwear in various sizes.
She’s dropping off the donations at several Valley shelters — including André House, which serves men, and Home Base Youth Services, which reaches out to teenagers and young adults.
Rodrick volunteered at André House one day last month with her mother and noticed the shelter didn’t have any hats.
“Hats are one of those things that we don’t have consistently,” but will make a great asset, said Holy Cross Father Bill Wack, director of André House. “It may not seem that cold now, but when you’re out all night, it gets cold.”
He said being able to hand out hats, blankets and other warm clothing allows his clients to layer for warmth and survival.
Rodrick had that in mind. Keeping the head warm often means keeping the whole body warm, she said. About 40 percent of the collection was winter hats.
Rodrick plans to make the drive an annual affair. Her brother, who will enter the fifth grade, will take over next year after Rodrick graduates.
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