On the second week of November, SFYAD announced the start of their Annual Winter Clothing Drive. This is the youth group's 4th donation drive organized at San Bao Temple. The response was especially overwhelming this year; over 2,200 pieces of clothings, triple the amount collected last year, were donated from the neighbors around the temple, temple devotees and many of their friends and family members. The room used to store the donations almost had difficulty closing.
25 volunteers came together on the December 15th, the last day of the drive, to sort and categorize all the donations into categories of jackets, sweaters, pants, blankets, etc. They also made sure all the clothes were of good quality for donation. More donations kept pouring in till the very last hour as the clothing were being sorted.
Before the volunteers begin sorting, Venerable Miao Zhong talked about how these clothes are like thoughts in our mind; they are a mess and some very filthy. As we are packing and sorting through the clothes, treat it as an opportunity to sort through the mess in our mind.
The volunteers loaded all the sorted bags of clothing into cars and drove to Saint Anthony’s Foundation, located at 121 Golden Gate Ave at the heart of San Francisco. The foundation’s Free Clothing Program is San Francisco’s largest free clothing program, providing warm clothes, interview or employment apparel, and children’s clothing to homeless and low-income families and individuals.
