As temperatures drop, Villagers will be looking through last year’s winter clothes to see what fits and what needs to be donated to causes like the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 12135 in Tellico Village’s winter clothing drive.
The clothing drive will be held Oct. 5-17, and Villagers will find donation boxes at the Welcome Center.
The effort started three years ago when post members were cleaning out closets as the seasons changed and realized there were many clothes that no longer fit. They thought about donating them to the Good Neighbors Shoppe but remembered all the homeless or needy veterans that could use the clothing and hosted the first drive at the Yacht Club, John Lacko, local VFW member and clothing drive co-coordinator, said.
“In years past, we will gather 70-80 large bags of good, used clothing, and we are just absolutely thrilled at the quality of the clothing that residents give us,” Tony Newton, local VFW past commander and clothing drive co-coordinator, said. “At the end of the drive, I’ve got tables in my garage ... and we’ll sort it out by types of clothing and men’s and women’s and the sort. … What amazes us quite frankly is the quality of the clothing that the donors are giving us. I’ll get clothing with new labels, tags still on them. Dry-cleaning labels, they’ll clean them before they send them. They’re folded. This is not bad stuff at all. This is high-end clothing that most of us would like to have in our closets.”
Lacko and Newton work with various organizations who help veterans and have a need for the clothes, including Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries, Tennessee Valley Coalition for the Homeless and Helen Ross McNabb Center. Oftentimes, there are women’s clothes donated but not much of a demand, so the men donate those to American Legion Post 13 in Maryville, which works with homeless and abused women.
“What we do is we kind of take an inventory of what we have, and then I’ll send an email out to the various organizations that come and pick them up from us and tell them what we have and so forth and say, ‘Well, what would you want,’ and they’ll say, ‘We’ll take 10 jackets and some of the gloves and socks,’ and so forth, and we’ll put that aside for them,” Lacko said. “Then they’ll come out maybe a week after we finish this off, and they’ll pick up all the stuff.”
The drive each year experiences an increase in clothes donated. Lacko suspects this year will continue that upward trend and hopes COVID-19 will give an additional boost. Villagers have already started calling the Welcome Center weeks in advance asking if they can drop clothes off.
“Being pent up in their houses and things like that, I’m sure people have gone through their closets, at least once, maybe twice,” Lacko said. “We tried to set this up for a time when the weather changes so that it spurs an interest. When everything’s moving along and everything’s fine and the summer’s still here, you’re not really going through your closet to pull out your winter clothes yet. But when you get a morning that’s 45 or 50 degrees like it’s been, well, all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Gee, I better see what fits me and what doesn’t fit.’ They’ve been trying to hold them off until Oct. 5.”
Despite the physical demand and time-consuming nature of the drive, Newton is proud to help out those in need, especially veteran brothers and sisters.
“There are folks out there who are going to be cold out there who don’t have good clothes,” Newton said. “We’re all veterans. Our agency is the Veterans of Foreign Wars, so all of us are combat veterans of one sort or another, and the people we’re servicing wore the uniform as we did, and they’re in need, and we happen to have the ability to fill that need. We’re just anxious and happy to do it.”
Clothing donations can be dropped off Oct. 5-17 at the designated boxes at 202 Chota Road, and monetary donations are welcome. For more information, call 865-408-8061.
