All-Star winner: Quawana’s Coats
Tennessee town helps thousands stay warm.
One day in 2012, Shaquawana Wester posted a message on Facebook about starting an informal coat drive, giving anyone a chance to pick out a donated coat with no questions asked.
“We were overwhelmed,” says the Cookeville, Tenn., woman. “Amazingly, we got 1,000 coats. There were just five of us trying to lay out the coats on seven tables. Hundreds of people came.”
Now in its third year, Quawana’s Coats collected and distributed more than 1,400 coats in 2014 and has grown into a community effort that includes schools, non-profit agencies, churches and the health department.
Wester’s project was selected for the Make A Difference Day All-Star Award, given to a project that has made an impact over more than one year. Wester will receive a $10,000 grant to further her charitable work at an awards luncheon in Washington, D.C., today.
For Quawana’s Coats, 60 volunteers collected and organized donated items on Make A Difference Day this past October. More than 350 families browsed the racks and could pick out two coats each, freshly cleaned by local dry cleaners.
Kristin Smith’s 4-year-old daughter, Delaney, picked out two: a pink coat lined with white fleece and a purple jacket decorated with a bright blue butterfly. Smith, a 30-year-old single mother of four, was laid off from her factory job last year. Her fiancé still works in the same packaging factory, she says, but “one salary doesn’t stretch very far with four kids. I liked the idea it wasn’t open only to people living in pub- lic housing. It was open to everybody.”
Wester, 38, says she got the idea for the project when she saw a homeless man without a coat one cold evening. A single mother of three, Wester has had to rely on public assistance most of her life. She sent her children to school in donated coats. But those coat giveaways required answering myriad questions about her income, work history and children. She wanted her drive to be different.
“I remember how embarrassing it was for me as a single mom,” says Wester, who now lives assistance-free. “I wanted to have something where anyone can come. No one has to sign anything. We don’t need to know your income. We don’t need to know where you live. We don’t need to know if you speak English. Because that sometimes puts up a barrier, and maybe people won’t ask for help because of those barriers.”
Wester hopes the drive serves as an example of what people in this rural Tennessee community can do to help one another.
“It’s not always about you. It’s about other people,” she says. “If something happens to me tomorrow, I know that my girls can look at me and see I’ve done something for the community and know they can do the same.”