Homeless Bag Project preps for spring drive
The few-hundred bags volunteers packed with warm clothing and snack food items in September at the Butler YWCA were quickly given away to people in need in November during the Butler County Stand Down event. That Homeless Bag Project drive was a big step up from the initiative’s beginnings in Stepfanie Schneider’s living room about 10 years ago.
The Homeless Bag Project aims to collect items — this spring hygiene items and articles of clothing — which Schneider and other volunteers distribute to people in need across the Butler community. Since she teamed up with Butler SUCCEED and the Butler YWCA, Schneider has been able to increase the number of items collected and the number of bags to give out; which in November went to veterans at Butler County Stand Down.
“As soon as the bags are getting made, they are going out the door,” Schneider said. “The fall drive ... we used all those bags for Butler County Stand Down and every single one of them left. There were 200.”
Schneider has been working with Butler SUCCEED since the spring of 2022, which led the Homeless Bag Project to now become a semi-annual event — one drive in the spring, one in the winter.
The drive for the spring project will be April 13 at the Butler YWCA, where the organization and its volunteers will collect donations and sort them into bags. Schneider said the drive is mainly looking for hygiene items and socks, which are harder to come by in shelters and therefore more requested by people in need.
“They can get food from a lot of community places but to get a bar of soap is very difficult and welfare doesn’t assist with that,” Schneider said. “There aren’t really many assistance programs that will help with hygiene products, so they were happy about that.”
The volunteers at the drive will also sort items into bags specifically packed for children. Sue Evans, administrative and program assistant at the Butler YWCA, said the September drive got many items for children, so now the demographic is becoming a bigger focus for the Homeless Bag Project.
“We sorted bags for children; little hats for winter and gloves,” Evans said. “Anything that was donated that was for children, we put in bags for them.”
The YWCA got on board with the project after Schneider connected with Josette Skobieranda Dau, associate director of Butler SUCCEED, in 2022. The donation drive now takes place at the YWCA, where there is plenty of room for volunteers to work, and room for items to be stored for later.
Skobieranda Dau said Butler SUCCEED’s role is “to support the project,” which it does by helping to provide volunteers, as well as getting more outside organizations involved with its work. Skobieranda Dau said Butler SUCCEED got other organizations involved, including agencies that can take certain items that are not suitable to be put in the bags.
“We also donate to the Butler County Humane Society any towels and things like that can’t be used,” Skobieranda Dau said. “We really want it to be this full-circle process where everything we get in is used. Every single item.”
After years of distributing items to people in need on her own, followed by a few now working with Butler SUCCEED, Schneider said she is working to attain nonprofit status for the Homeless Bag Project.
“We should be a nonprofit by summer; we are way on our way,” Schneider said. “I think that was the goal last year was by this summer, and we should be there.”
The Homeless Bag Project drive is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 13 at the Butler YWCA, 120 W. Cunningham St. For more information, including to make a donation on a day other than April 13, or to sign up to volunteer, call Butler SUCCEED at 724-841-0477.
