Operation Keep Warm launches its fifth year
One chilly day five years ago, an official with Haven Behavioral Hospital had a hot idea. Many of the clients served by the 48-bed inpatient psychiatric hospital in Southeast Albuquerque are homeless. So when it came time to discharge them into the real world, it often meant sending them back into a cold world onto cold streets.
Some patients left with only the clothing they came in with, and sometimes not even with that, if the clothing was too soiled or too infested with bedbugs.
That was too troubling to Lea Harrison, Haven’s director of business development/patient
advocate.
“We do our very best to make sure our patients once discharged are set up with somewhere to stay, something available and appropriate, but a lot of people want to go back on the street,” she said. “We can’t force them to do anything unless they have a treatment guardian, and that’s heartbreaking. So if we can soften or make somewhat bearable their lives with warm clothing, we will go to the dollar store and get them. To not do that is inhumane and that’s wrong.”
She started Operation Keep Warm, which enlists community partners to donate warm items of clothing, such as hats, gloves, scarves and socks that are then distributed to the homeless clients during the winter.
That first year, the project collected 100 to 200 items, she said.
The project expanded the next year to include donation boxes placed in health care centers and other businesses so the public could chip in. That year, nearly 500 items were collected, enough not only for Haven clients but for other agencies, such as Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless, Barrett House and Crossroads for Women.
Last year, more than 800 items were collected. And this time, they included extra-special donations handmade by a group of extra-special women.
They are residents of a West Side apartments run by AHEPA, short for American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, which provides affordable housing for low-income seniors and disabled people.
“They may not have big incomes, but they have big hearts, and they do this with their hearts for their neighbors who aren’t as fortunate,” said Mary Shortell, service coordinator for the local AHEPA facilities. “It gives them a little opportunity to be philanthropists.”
Already this year, five residents and one of the resident’s daughters have turned in 399 knitted or crocheted scarves, hats and handbags — one resident, Maria Elena Serrano, crafted 109 hats since the project began again in April.
“They just cranked out this amazing number of items,” Shortell said. “We’ll have more by Christmas.”
The yarn was donated by the Daughters of Penelope, a philanthropic women’s group connected with AHEPA and with the St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Albuquerque.
“The Daughters of Penelope recognized the need not just for these warm items, but for the need for people to give back in whatever way they can,” she said. “This is a way for the residents to do that and perhaps make the people who receive these items happy because they will know that there was love that created these things.”
One woman told her that every stitch she makes is a prayer. Lordy, do we need prayer. I’m writing this as another week in America begins, which is to say who knows what new horror will have hit the homeland by the time you read this? It is a helpless feeling, like being stuck in a ceaseless stream of madmen and massacres.
In times like these, we look for those moments of goodness, for the ways we can create change, joy and sanity. We can do that in many ways. Donate a pair of socks or gloves to Operation Keep Warm. Stop seeing the homeless, the mentally ill, the migrants and the needy as less than human. Stand up to the callous and the craven. Face hate with kindness. Vote.
“People are trying to find ways to band together within what scope and control they have to make the world a better place,” Haven’s Harrison said. “It really does help our community.”
It’s time to give that a try, because winter is coming.