Community Service Project

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Care packages will be delivered to persons in transitional housing and/or local homeless shelters in San Antonio by TRiO SSS and McNair students

Donation Collections Have Begun

Donation Stations: Administration Building 225 & 120

Donation Items Requested from the UIW Community:

coffee mugs (to put items in)--crack and chip free
unopened small toiletries such as sample/hotel shampoos, soaps, lotions, etc.
new individually wrapped tea bags/instant coffee bags
other small, thoughtful items for adults who may be in transition

Care Package Assembly & Delivery by TRiO Participants

Assembly by UIW Community:

April 5th - 7th, from 8 am- 5 pm on Dubuis Lawn

Delivery by TRiO Participants:

Apirl 8, 2010 from 1-4 pm

Hobby of giving spreads the feel-good factor all year

Retrieved from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/jerrylarge/2008441909_jdl27.html

by Jerry Large

Seattle Times staff columnist

Picture by ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Linda Stahl, of Mercer Island, has been making and collecting gifts for homeless people for more than 20 years. She collects and buys items all year round, packages the items and then during the holidays delivers them to homeless shelters.

Having trouble figuring out what to be thankful for?

Here's a tip: Give someone else a reason to feel grateful. Giving has been scientifically proven to feel good — but Linda Stahl could have told you that. She's made holiday gift-giving a year-round hobby.

Stahl works in the finance department at The Times. About 25 years ago she helped a co-worker put goodies into coffee mugs to give as Christmas gifts to homeless people in shelters.

Stahl got hooked on the idea and continued it, filling mugs with combs, soap and toiletries and surrounding the cups with tea bags and instant noodles.

She's a resourceful gatherer.

Her husband, David, used to bring little shampoos and soaps home from business trips, and that got her thinking. Now co-workers returning from trips drop off toiletries for her.

And her love of garage sales led her to collect toys. She stuffs stockings with toys and buys candy to sweeten the gifts, which she takes to shelters and food banks.

It's all pleasure for her. "I can feed my garage-sale illness," she says. "I get the thrill of the hunt. I get to bag the game and bring it home, and once a year I get rid of it."

She puts away money each month so she can make a trip to Costco in October to buy tea bags, candy, noodles, even socks in bulk, items that this year came to about $500. She also includes sugar packets that she collects a few at a time whenever she stops at a coffee shop.

You don't have to be Bill Gates to create a philanthropic enterprise.

Her husband washes the mugs and sorts toiletries. Women get the prettiest cups. Stahl assembles 50 gifts for women and 50 for men and drops them off at shelters run by the Compass Center.

Stahl, who is Jewish, also now puts together packages for Jewish Family Service, without the Christmas trappings. Who gets gifts and what's in them is always changing, but her altruism doesn't.

Stahl traces her interest in giving back to college at the University of Oklahoma. One Christmas, she talked the women in her dorm, most of them Jewish, into doing some charity work.

She visited an Indian reservation with a local minister and says she had never seen such deep poverty. She went back to the dorm and told the other women, "Give me whatever you're not wearing."

Stahl went home during the holiday break and "caught hell from my parents because they had to buy me new everything." But they were proud that she cared so much.

Seeing the reservation made her think, "It could have been me. I kept thinking how lucky I am and that sometimes life isn't fair. All I wanted to do was help."

Stahl was born in New York, but her father was in the Army and the family moved every year.

After the Army, her father got a job with Boeing and moved here. Stahl followed her parents later as a newly divorced mother of three, and says she became a "born-again Seattleite."

She's 69 and in a few weeks she'll be retired, a little earlier than she'd planned, but she's not complaining. She'll have plenty of time for her hobby.

"I do what I do because it makes me feel good."

That's something to be thankful for.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

What is the TRiO McNair Scholars Program?

The mission of the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Program at the University of the Incarnate Word is to prepare less affluent, first generation college students, and students from groups underrepresented in doctoral studies, for success in achieving a Ph. D. degree. Dr. Roberta Leichnitz is the Director of the program.

For more information on the McNair Scholars Program visit: http://www.uiw.edu/mcnair/index.htm

TRIO Student Success Program