DAK/Holiday Coalition Fall Coat Drive A Success!

By: Kate Richards, 2008 Coat Drive Coordinator and DAK Secretary

We would like to thank everyone who donated coats and/or helped during our first coat drive with the Loudoun Community Holiday Coalition. With your help, we were able to collect over 600 coats, with over 500 coats being distributed to families in need during the first two weekends in October 2008. The surplus winter coats were donated to LINK for their November 2008 coat drive and the surplus lightweight coats were donated to Goodwill. We will begin collecting coats for our second annual coat drive at the end of the summer/early fall.

You may be wondering how your organization can do a large-scale service project like a coat drive. In our case, we were approached by Kara Earl, who works with the Loudoun County Holiday Coalition, about taking over the coat drive that was previously partnered with the Holiday Coalitions’ Holiday Store. We took the idea back to the club to seek their approval since this would be a major undertaking for our small (but growing) club. Everyone in our club agreed that this would be a great project for us, so then the real work began. In order to do a large-scale service project (especially one that relies on the community to support) you need a well thought out game plan.

Our game plan included:

• A timeline for the entire project, start to finish
• Developing a list of places to contact about being coat drop off locations (Kara graciously provided us information on who the Holiday Coalition has partnered with)
• Developing deadlines to contact the places as well as put the drop off boxes out as well as making certain club members the point of contact
• Providing advertising and PR (again Kara helped us with sharing contact information)
• Developing a schedule for when the coats would be picked up, who was responsible for each drop off location, and when they would be dropped off at our coat drive location
• Our club came together for one afternoon for sorting the donated coats into the various sizes, age ranges and sexes (S,M,L; children, youth, adults, Men and Women’s)
• We developed a system to track the number of coats collected and distributed
• We held the coat distribution over two weekends in the beginning of October

We made sure to have both English and Spanish versions of our fliers and advertisements. We learned that we need more people on the collecting/sorting end of the project and that a smaller group from our club can handle the distribution end. For our first year we are very happy that we collected over 600 coats (in years past the Holiday Coalition and their other partners have been able to collect many more coats). We expect to collect more coats in the future because last year was the first year the coat drive and the Holiday Store distribution were separate events. The event is an earlier event than in years past and will continue to be on the early October timeline. We are looking to have this project grow along with our club and we are really looking forward to the future partnerships we develop with this service project (and other community based efforts).

A big thank you goes out to all of our coat collection partners this year: Sterling Community Center, Cascades Library, Ashburn Library, South Riding Town Hall, Dulles South Multipurpose Center, Ashburn Fuddruckers, Beyond Wellness Chiropractic, Precision Auto Care, Inc. (Leesburg), Algonkian Elementary School, Creighton's Corner Elementary School, Seldens Landing Elementary School, Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School, Farmwell Station Middle School, and Blue Ridge Middle School.