May 16, 2022
This year’s Mother’s Day Outreach started off slowly, with only the top of a picnic table covered with supplies. Normally, we would have an abundance of Amazon boxes being delivered as well as physical donations overflowing the firehouse garage. With only one week left to meet our deadline, we decided to revamp our efforts. On April 25th, The New Haven Fire Department put a call-out to the New Haven community via news and media outlets and we are happy to say that come May 5th, we had enough supplies to fill half of the fire station bay on Fountain Street.
On the morning of Thursday, May 5th, volunteers from the Connecticut State Police and the Yale Latino Networking Group started unpacking, organizing, and filling tote bags. By early afternoon 325 totes were filled with toiletries and other items such as manicure sets, body sprays, robes, slippers, and journals. To our surprise and pleasure, we ran out of totes and had to make a second call, our community never disappoints, and we secured additional bags and used monetary donations to purchase some.
Friday morning, we were met with a crew from Fox 61 News along with more volunteers who helped us finish the remaining bags. With a procession of vehicles, we led a small parade throughout the city of New Haven. We visited five locations, cheering up brand new mothers of newborns as well as those of older children, who were all too eager to greet us. The smiles on their faces were priceless, our efforts were certainly appreciated and not remiss. The overflow of donations allowed us to set aside totes for other agencies and homeless camps to be delivered over the weekend, as well as special baskets handcrafted for mothers in the community.
We are grateful to everyone who helped us surpass our goal. Thank you for your participation and continued support of the Mother’s Day Outreach initiative and we look forward to seeing you again next year.
-Tanya Colón & Kat Viera
Event photos can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=YaleLatinoGroup&set=a.5230687…