A donation to a locally-based charity is a Christmas gift that can give back throughout the entire year.
I have boxes and bags of clothes. Some adult items, but mostly kids’ clothes, left behind by neighbors who moved, or put out for the trash collectors; very wearable things in good condition, some with the price tags still on them.
“Project Blessing is a local charity, with branches that serve my home town of “Lexington, Michigan, and the nearby towns of “Carsonville and Port Sanilac. It’s funded by local donations only. It receives no government grants. The offices are staffed by volunteers and open only a few hours each week, including Saturdays. Project Blessing also operates a thrift shop in Carsonville.
Every city and town has locally-based charities like Project Blessing, that receive no government funding and are dependent on donations of cash, or items such as clothing and furniture.
Locally-based charities are not top-heavy with levels of bureaucracy and salaried administrators. Your donations of cash or items will go directly to those who need them.
Project Blessing serves part of Michigan’s mostly rural Thumb region. When the economy slows, Michigan’s auto-based economy is affected sooner and deeper than other parts of the country, and the rural parts of the state are hardest hit.
Everyone has clothes they never wear or can’t use, boxed and stored, or in the back of the closet. The need for clothes doesn’t know a season, but Christmas and the approaching winter make donations of clothes at this time of the year more important. To single moms with growing children, clothes are clothes. It doesn’t matter where they came from or who once owned them.
Everyone has extra clothes, boxed and stored, or hanging in the back of the closet. I have things I never wear. Some are slightly too big. Some I’ve outgrown. Others are in colors I really don’t like. Others I rescued from trash piles and kept until I could pass them on to someone who could use them.
I collected my kids’ clothes, and then looked for shirts and pants and sweaters I haven’t worn in a long time, and probably won’t again, and added them to my Project Blessing donation.
Throughout the year, when I see the Project’s name in the news, I’ll be reminded that, back around Christmas, the clothes I donated filled someone’s need. Maybe not as much as an IPOD or a new computer game. It is, however, the smallest light that often shines the brightest.
