As the D.C. area moves deeper into fall and chilly temperatures, one organization is ramping up its efforts to get coats to homeless people, including the thousands of veterans who do not have a stable place to live.
A nonprofit, One Warm Coat, is asking community members to rummage through their coat closets to find a jacket they don’t wear anymore to donate.
“When you’ve got a population that’s experiencing homelessness, we can’t just provide them a coat, say, at the beginning of November,” said the nonprofit’s CEO Beth Amodio. “We’ve learned that it’s an ongoing need, because when someone is moving around from place to place, they may have a coat, and then it gets lost. It gets torn, it gets wet, gets dirty, it gets stolen, it gets left behind.”
One Warm Coat provides the tools and connections for just about anybody to either participate in a coat drive or host one in their neighborhood, school or place of worship.
“One of the coolest aspects of the program is once you collect the coats, you can use our map of nonprofit partners to find a nonprofit near you,” Amodio said.
Some of the organization’s partners in the D.C. area include the nonprofit Veterans of the Vietnam War and the Homeless Outreach.
“Local programs that serve veterans and other people can really utilize those and get them distributed into the hands of people that need them,” she said.
The nonprofit asks that people wash the coats and only donate ones that don’t have holes or stains.
According to the latest Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, more than 35,000 veterans are experiencing homeless.
“Even though we distributed more than half a million coats, 80% of our nonprofit partners said they still did not receive enough coats to serve their clients,” she said.
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