This is a picture of what was once a perfectly respectable garage owned by my friend, Sara Capen Salomons, one of the movers and shakers behind Great Hartford’s 100-day challenge to greatly reduced the number of people who are chronically homeless.
As people get housed — and they are getting housed at a pace you can’t even imagine — people are opening up their homes and their wallets and donating household goods that these folks desperately need.
Imagine having only the goods you can carry on your back. And then someone hands you a key and you open the door, and — if you’re Sal Pinna — you carefully arrange your goods in a closet, and curl up to sleep on your living room floor.
Sal’s good now. Sara and others — including Sarah Simonelli at Chrysalis Center, and Sal’s friend, Sarah Ratchford — and does everyone have to be named Sara/h to get into this business? — have done amazing things to get him situated. He’s got a bed. He’s got a table and chairs. He’s even got Batman sheets on his bed, so he’s set.
Things are moving so quickly that the group has run out of storage, and the stuff is still coming.I got a call one afternoon about a guy with a truckload of furniture he wanted to donate. Some good folks at Aetna are meeting today to assemble 50 move-in kits with things like dish soap, personal care items, and the like. Those have to go somewhere. I have three different people waiting to donate couches and chairs. Just today, four people contacted me asking where they can drop stuff off.
Early on, Sara (Salomons, and try to keep up) foolishly said she’d donate her garage for the items. But the items are coming in too fast, and now the group needs more than any thing some place to store this wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Do you have a garage? Do you know a basement that’s not being used? Can you help Sis. Sara out? If so, contact her at sara.salomons@journeyhomect.org. Help a sister (actually, a bunch of sisters, and a whole lot of brothers) out.
Dating Jesus 