The Hawthorn Woods Women’s Club (HWWC) is helping women and children currently living in shelters during the holiday season through their ‘Holiday Helpers’ program.
Amelia Leng, junior, is familiar with the ‘Holiday Helpers’ program because her mom is a member of the HWWC and thinks this is a great way for LZHS students to help others during the holidays.
“[Volunteers] can gain a better appreciation for what they have and realize how lucky they are compared to some people,” Leng said.
The HWWC’s ‘Holiday Helpers’ program offers different opportunities to the community to help the shelters, such as ‘Adopting-a-family’ and purchasing gifts for them or creating goodie bags for women in the shelters. Each opportunity can give gifts to the women and children who are unable to purchase these gifts on their own.
To receive gifts, the women and children in the shelters create a wish-list of the things they want for the holiday season.
“Typically, it’s winter coats, snow boots, or it may be things for their apartments in the shelter,” Amy Foor-Noland, ‘Adopt-a-family’ coordinator, said. “We get those wish lists and we have to find people in the community who want to buy the gifts on their list for them.”
Another way the HWWC helps the shelters during the holidays is by getting involved in the Holiday Store at A Safe Place, one of the shelters the HWWC supports.
“During the holiday season, one large room in A Safe Place is transformed as the Holiday Store, [where] the women and children in the club who participate in the program can come shop for one another,” Michele Teel, volunteer coordinator, said. “It is a safe environment with no cost and no money is exchanged for acquisition on these gifts.”
The Holiday Store consists of donations given by the community. These donations can be gifted from one woman in the shelter to another for no cost.
This makes the holiday season more enjoyable and less stressed for the women in the shelters because they do not have to worry about earning the money to buy gifts for their family, Teel said.
The shelters are currently asking for more volunteers and donations. They especially look for more help in the off-season, when shelters do not receive as much attention as during the holidays.
“It’s not just this time of year, it’s throughout the year that [the shelters] look for help too,” Teel said. “It goes beyond the holiday times, it’s food drives that could be put together [and] they are always looking for paper goods, even after the holiday season.”
The HWWC has been providing gifts to shelters through their ‘Holiday Helpers’ program for over 20 years, and the women and children in the shelters are grateful each year.
“I think it’s all for a great cause because the holidays are really a time for everyone to be happy and forget the hardships they’re having,” Leng said. “You really have to think about how these people would feel waking up Christmas morning with nothing.”