Teddy
Bear Project Put on Hold
Well, the news from Newtown and
Sandy Hook Elementary School caught me by surprise; but in some ways I was not
all that surprised. After helping
Savannah embark on a worthy cause, as detailed here on Sunday evening, I found
this article from al.com which gave me the chills and a rock in my stomach at
the same time.
Newtown sets up task force to handle
donations
By
The Associated Press on January 06, 2013 at 8:30 PM, updated January 07, 2013
at 1:16 AM
NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — Chris Kelsey is
the tax assessor in Newtown, but for the better part of three weeks, his job
has been setting up and organizing a warehouse to hold the toys, school
supplies and other gifts donated in the wake of the massacre at the Sandy Hook
Elementary school.
In this Monday, Dec. 31, 2012 photo,
piles of donated stuffed animals await sorting in a warehouse in Newtown, Conn.
Tens of thousands of items have been sent to the town in the wake of the Dec.
14 massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, forcing officials to set up an
infrastructure to deal with the donations.
Despite the town's pleas to stop
sending gifts, Kelsey said trucks have been arriving daily with tokens of
support from across the world, some for the families of those killed, others
for the children of Sandy Hook, still others for the town.
"A lot of the town's normal
business is still on pause," he said. "I have a couple of people
still doing assessor's business, and then if they can, open mail a couple hours
too. We're all kind of doing what we can to get this done."
A task force has been set up to
coordinate the more than 800 volunteers who have been working to sort the
gifts, open mail and answer the thousands of emails and phone calls offering
assistance.
The volunteers have begun making a dent
in the pile of tens of thousands of teddy bears that stretched to the warehouse
ceiling. By last week, they had sorted 30,000 of them into small, medium and
large sizes, catalogued them and put them in boxes. They are also separating
and boxing piles of crayons, pencils, books and much more.
"It's a ton of stuff, and we have
an operation just as big for mail as well," Kelsey said.
There are also 26 large moving boxes in
the warehouse, each labeled with a victim's name. When a gift comes in
specifically addressed to those families, it goes in those boxes. The families
have been coming in periodically to empty them.
A toy giveaway was held for all Newtown
children before Christmas and some of the remaining toys and stuffed animals
have been taken to children's hospitals. The rest will be stored until the town
decides where they should go, Kelsey said. He said letters have been sent to
each of the victim's families asking for their input. His cell phone is filled
with emails from charities across the country.
"Everybody has a hand out,"
he said. "We're just beginning that process now. The charities suggested
by the families will get the top priority."
The work organizing the warehouse is
being done by volunteers from Adventist Community Services, a faith-based group
that has done similar work after hurricanes and other natural disasters.
"Our thing is warehouses," said
the Rev. William Warcholik, a pastor from Rhode Island. "Our specialty is
collecting, organizing and distributing donated goods."
The group was paired with Kelsey after
contacting the town's volunteer task force. Kevin and Robin Fitzgerald started
the group last year to organize neighborhood cleanups following two storms that
brought down trees all over town.
"We referred to it as friends with
chain saws," Robin Fitzgerald said.
Immediately after the school massacre,
which left 26 people dead, people started calling the Fitzgeralds looking for a
way to help in the grief-stricken town. Local churches and businesses began
getting similar calls.
After meeting with town officials, the
Red Cross and other stakeholders, the Fitzgeralds were put in charge of coordinating
the volunteer effort.
They started working in their living
room with a couple of cellphones and their own laptop computers. Local
businessman Peter D'Amico gave them office space. Companies donated computers,
Wi-Fi, phones and other equipment and set up a call center. The Newtown
Volunteer Task Force now has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and
a toll-free telephone number, (855) 364-6600, with eight lines coming in.
"Our mission here is to ease the
burden on the town resources, matching people who feel the need to do something
with a task that needed to be done," Kevin Fitzgerald said. "This is
work FEMA or someone in government would do after a natural disaster, but there
is no such thing for this kind of disaster."
The group has been deploying about 800
volunteers to open the town's mail, work at the warehouse and connect potential
donations with the correct fund or organization.
Liz Eaton, 70, who lives in the village
of Sandy Hook, was sent to the warehouse to help box bears.
"People at church have said they
needed some help," she said. "And I just wanted to help out."
Others are tasked with returning every
phone call that has come into the town offering help.
"We had someone offer 26 granite
benches for any memorial," Robin Fitzgerald said. "That's put into a
list of what we call escalated offers, so we mark that down and when they
decide on a memorial they will know about that offer."
The town originally expected it would
take the task force about two weeks to complete its work. The Fitzgeralds said
the task force now expects to be working for about three months, possibly
longer.
"What we're telling people on the phone
now is that if you are holding a fundraiser in your local community, we
appreciate it, but direct those resources to your local community, that's what
the families want," Robin Fitzgerald said. "About 99½ percent of the
time that works. But the other half says, 'We're coming anyway.' And then we
just give them the address of the warehouse or here."
While I
was experiencing that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, there was an equal
amount of joy which this article brought, as I pondered the dilemma. America has not let those children and school
employees down; we have not forgotten.
It seems to me and was a shared
response my a dear church member on Sunday night that far too often we allow
something of this magnitude to take place and after the dust settles we
forget. This was something which seems
to happen anytime the media circus dies down and we get back to the regular way
of life in our respective areas of the country.
Not true at the moment in
regards to Sandy Hook or Newtown. They
are attempting to take care of a massive amount of items coming their way from
all parts of the country, as people dig in and reach out with love to those who
have been left behind, helping them pull back together and continue on with
their lives. According the above
mentioned article, it appears they will be sorting through the items of love
for the next several months.
When I shared this situation
with Savannah, she was as heart broken as I was. Not that they had so much stuff; for her it
was the thought of the bears being stored away in a cold warehouse, alone and
no one to love on them. We pondered this
and I started making calls and brainstorming to see what might be a good course
of action for a ten year old who wants to help someone else.
I called my good friend, Mel
Johnson with the Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief agency and we spoke of the
dilemma. There is a program they use,
whereby they collect a specific type of stuffed animal, prepare an emergency
zip lock bag, which they can give to children who have gone through a natural
disaster, such as the April Tornadoes of 2011 or Hurricane Sandy. Again, we are looking at changes in the
profile of the ministry Savannah has envisioned, and dealing with a storage
issue until the next deployment of this particular ministry of ADR.
There are other opportunities
and possibilities for this ministry, and we will explore them over the next few
weeks, talk about them and pray about them.
I hope what we will be able to do is some back with another opportunity,
something which may benefit our own state and at the same time give us the
privilege of helping those who are less fortunate than we are.
Personally, I wish to thank you
for your willingness to be a part of this challenge Savannah has placed before
us. Your words of encouragement, calls
and offers to be a part of something as big as this could have been, have truly
reminded me how precious and sweet you all are.
May God bless you all and get ready we will come back with something
else, soon.
JWF January 8, 2013
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