Ayrshire Students Helping The Homeless This Winter
Good samaritans from the Kilwinning Campus are looking for essentials such as food and clothes to take to Glasgow.
Rucksacks full of clothes, hats, gloves and sleeping bags will be handed out to the homeless this winter by Ayrshire College students.
Students Jamie Stevenson and Olga Bresch are leading their NC Social Science class in a Winter Clothes Drive to encourage people to think about the homeless during this tough time of the year.
The volunteers will hand out the winter essentials across Ayrshire and the big cities in Scotland, as well as “anywhere people could benefit from this”.
They are particularly keen for people to donate sleeping bags, but they have also encouraged people to “use their imagination” and include other items such as books and notepads.
Jamie knows that this will not solve the homelessness problem in the country, but feels obligated to try alleviate some of the dangers during the harshest months.
Jamie said “We’ve got 68 volunteers – the response has been so positive. We’ve been surprised at the vast number of people wanting to help out. It’s important that people suffering from homelessness know that we care about them, we feel this is just the human thing to do.
“We’ve spoken with someone from Glasgow City Mission a Christian charity group who help the disadvantaged in Glasgow and he surprised me when he said a lot of homeless people are families who can’t break the cycle. If we show we’re helping and caring about them, it might go some way to help pull them out of this situation.”
The group has already collected an impressive haul of clothing through the generosity of students on the Kilwinning campus. Jamie will also go around the Kilmarnock campus on Thursday and the Ayr campus on Friday to try to bring in more items.
He said “As soon as we’ve collected enough, we’re going to organise it into rucksacks and then hand it out on an ongoing basis, hopefully started in a week or two. We think it’s best to have a rucksack with a few pieces of clothing, a sleeping bag, a book, and other wee bits and pieces.”
The class was inspired to organise this goodwill gesture after hearing about what a classmate does at Christmas.
Their friend Liz does not have a Christmas dinner, instead she takes her family up to Glasgow and hands items out to the homeless.
Jamie said “I’ve never done anything like this before, but when we heard Liz’s story, we thought that was a really nice thing to do. We also saw a group on Facebook started by two girls who will be doing a similar thing, but we thought by using the College we could gather a lot of items for these people – who are in desperate need of help.
“I do stand-up comedy at The Stand, and before a gig I go around the city and end up talking to these guys. They worry about getting ill during the winter. If we’re not going to be able to get them off the streets, we should be looking for the means to help them through the winter.”
If you would like to help by donating items or volunteering to help distribute the rucksacks, contact winterclothesdriveayrshire@gmail.com or drop into the Student President’s Office at the Ayr, Kilmarnock and Kiwinning campuses.