City residents will have an opportunity to help some of America’s veterans of armed service on Saturday morning of when a collection drive will be staged at Stanley Park to gather home furnishings for veterans who have been homeless but have found apartments they need to furnish with their severely limited resources.
The event is scheduled for 9 a.m. until noon in the parking lot adjacent to the park’s Asian Garden, according Amy L’Esperance of the park’s development office, and items collected will be given to a volunteer organization, Homeward Vets, for distribution to recently homeless veterans who may be struggling to furnish new apartments.
L’Esperance said that contributors who wish to donate items prior to the event may deliver them to the park office between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
Homeward Vets is the brainchild of David Felty of Southampton and his wife, Lisa.
Felty said recently that in 2009 he started to collect furniture and furnishings discarded by friends and relatives, serviceable items left on tree belts for waste collection and items found at tag sales.
Lisa Felty works as the director of housing programs for the Northampton Housing Authority and said that her husband’s finds were initially stored in sheds on their property while she spoke with case workers for veterans who had been homeless but have found apartments with assistance from federal, state and volunteer programs such as Veterans Affairs Support Housing and Soldier On.
Veterans identified by the case workers were provided with the furniture and furnishings the Feltys had collected and, in March of 2012, the organization became incorporated as a non-profit corporation to expand the work.
Since then, the program has been the recipient of storage space donated by Autumn Properties in Easthampton and recently learned of additional space offered by a company in Ludlow, Mass Development.
Felty said that he has “a little network” of volunteers, many of them veterans who have previously been helped by Homeward Vets and are eager to “give back”, who help him deliver furnishings to veterans moving off the streets and into their own homes.
“It’s a little sad”, Lisa Felty said, “after they’ve found a home there’s nothing in it” but said that the veterans don’t complain but are happy just to have a roof over their heads.
She said of her husband “He’s a veteran so he understands” and said the veterans “connect with him.”
The donation drive at Stanley Park will focus on kitchen items for the veterans setting up their new homes.
L’Esperance said that the goal of the Saturday collection is for items such as dinnerware, cookware and small appliances such as toasters, microwave ovens, toaster ovens and coffee makers.
“People think of the big things like beds” she said “but a lot of times what gets overlooked are the small items.”
Felty asked the park planners to focus on kitchen furnishings which can be stockpiled and delivered with other larger items for their first effort to help his organization.
L’Esperance said that her hope is that local residents doing spring-cleaning may find serviceable items that they may no longer have a need for but may be reluctant to discard. She said that those items may well fill a need for a veteran who is setting up a household and she said a central collection of those items will make it easy for Felty and his volunteers to collect a large number of items without spending a lot of time and traveling large distances to gather them.
Cash will also be accepted and will be used to buy supermarket gift cards for the veterans.
Robert McKean, the director of the park, said the effort supports “a great cause” and called the recipients of the kitchen wares which will be collected “true heroes and real patriots of our country” who “sure can use our help.”
