One plus one equals not just two, but the power of two. When the two are Carroll Overstreet and Lisa Huse, that’s power enough to help thousands of people.
The women are co-workers at Providence Everett Medical Center’s Pacific Campus, in the lab’s client service department. Several years ago, lab workers sponsored a family at Christmas, providing gifts and essentials.
“And Carroll said, ‘Shouldn’t we be able to do more?’ So she and I took off from there,” said Huse, 34, noting the beginnings of Project Warm-Up.
Their effort has grown in three years to fill the garage at Overstreet’s Smokey Point home. Boxes of donated new clothing, much of it from a Wal-Mart store, are stacked floor to ceiling.
The items will be given to five shelters in Snohomish County: the Cocoon House teen shelter, the Interfaith Association of Churches’ Hospitality Network Family Shelter, the Snohomish County Center for Battered Women, the Everett Gospel Mission and Housing Hope.
Throughout August, Overstreet and Huse are asking hospital employees and the public to bring new and lightly used clothing and other goods to bins outside the cafeterias at the hospital’s Pacific and Colby campuses.
The weekend of Sept. 11 is reserved for sorting and distributing what they’ve gathered. Hospital spokeswoman Cheri Russum, who plans to help with the annual sort-a-thon, said it’s “a good thing to do on a day noted for tragedy.”
For Overstreet, 53, it was personal adversity that spurred her involvement in Project Warm-Up. Three summers ago, not long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, her husband died.
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Project Warm-Up collection bins are outside cafeterias at Providence Everett Medical Center’s Colby and Pacific campuses through August. Items collected are donated to area shelters. Needed are new and lightly used clothing, socks, jackets, hats, mittens and baby clothes, plus diapers, baby food, toys, blankets, toiletries and cleaning supplies.
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“The sympathy I got was so overwhelming, I had to give something back,” she said. “For me, it took on new meaning, that I could do something to help.
“There isn’t anybody in this world who hasn’t, at one time or another, had a need for help,” Overstreet added.
While bins are out only in August, the collecting never stops. The women are grateful to Wal-Mart in Mount Vernon, which saves new clothing that has been returned and when packages are opened in the store. Some hospital employees contribute to the effort all year.
Each year, Project Warm-Up aims higher. In 2003, the women put together more than 2,000 toiletry bags, each with soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste and shampoo. The goal this year is 4,000 bags.
Overstreet contacted a hotel supplier and made her pitch for travel-size toiletry donations.
“These two women are so persuasive, they could talk you into putting your money into a savings account when you’re in the heat of sure-bet winning at a Las Vegas casino,” Russum said.
New clothes and shower items “give people back a little humanity,” Overstreet said. “A lot of them come into a shelter, they don’t even have a bar of soap.”
“The need is huge,” said Petrina Lin, development director at Cocoon House in Everett. “Most of the kids who come to us come with very minimal things. Sometimes they come with nothing at all.”
Cocoon House and the Cocoon Complex serve 145 to 160 homeless teens annually at an eight-bed emergency shelter, and another 45 to 60 in long-term transitional housing, Lin said.
“It’s amazing, when they bring these huge boxes, the kids really get so excited. Most of it is new stuff,” she said. New underwear and socks, basics most of us take for granted, “those things are hard to come by for us,” she added. Coats and running shoes are also in short supply.
Multiply the needs at Cocoon House by the number of other shelters in the area, and it’s apparent Project Warm-Up makes a considerable difference for those most in need.
The women are proud to work for the Providence Health System, which Overstreet said “does tons of stuff in the community.”
How many people can rattle off an employer’s mission statement? Sitting in Overstreet’s living room, Huse listed what the Catholic hospital system calls its core values: “compassion, justice, respect, excellence and stewardship.”
Overstreet nodded that her friend had it right, then said, “We take them to heart.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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