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Gonzaga Peace Club Launches Drive for Supplies
Over the past few months, a group of Gonzaga students has been volunteering and serving our homeless neighbors at the L and M Street, NW tent encampments, as well as in the vicinity of Union Station near the school's campus. Along with Legal Aid Clinic for the Homeless, Pathways to Housing DC, DC Mutual Aid, and People for Fairness Coalition, the Gonzaga students provide food, water, and hygiene items to the residents of these communities. This lifesaving work takes place every Sunday afternoon just blocks away from Gonzaga, and is a reminder of how poverty and homelessness have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Gonzaga Peace Club recently launched a donation drive to support this work, which is captured in this student-produced video below:
Gonzaga Peace Club members have offered to use their homes as donation drop-off points, and will bring collected supplies into the city to distribute to encampment residents. The list of items they are collecting includes hygiene products, ready-to-eat food (no cans please), bottled water, as well as masks, wipes, travel size toiletry kits, and first aid kits. To see a map of drop-off locations, please click here. If you do not live near a drop-off point, you can also use Amazon to order items directly to one of the homes on the map.
"From the moment you step on campus as a freshman, Gonzaga students develop a unique sense of generosity and empathy that allows them to tackle moral and ethical issues within our society," says Gonzaga Peace Club member Michael LesStrang '22. "Seeing our homeless brothers and sisters living in tents just blocks away from the US Capitol building is both deeply disturbing and heartbreaking. To combat homelessness and serve our unhoused neighbors is not just the right thing to do, it’s a way to fulfill the promise we all made to be Men for Others."
For more information about The Gonzaga Peace Club and this project, you can follow the club on Instagram here.
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