12 - 12Shares
Students at Lakeside High School are hard at work collecting yellow plastic shopping bags that will be used to create mats for the homeless.
The students, who are members of Ali’s A.C.E. Food Pantry & Clothes Closet, hope to be able to donate enough material to make four mats.
A.C.E. (All Created Equal) gives Lakeside students and their families support through food distribution, clothes sharing, and nutrition education with dignity and attention to special needs, according to its mission statement. A.C.E. members have to do community service hours, and this semester the hours have been spent collecting material for and creating plastic yarn, or plarn, which is used to make the mats.
A.C.E. Executive Director Kay Fleischner said a club member first heard about the mats as a member of the Leadership Hot Springs Youth Leadership program. Wanting to learn more, the group invited Katie Gibson, associate director of United Way of the Ouachitas, to speak to them.
Fleischner said they learned that every January a census is taken to determine how many homeless people are in the county. While conducting the census, the mats are given out to homeless people and can be used a number of ways, including being placed under sleeping bags or as a tarp in the rain.
Initially, the members wanted to make mats, but Fleischner said none of the students know how to knit or crochet, so instead, they are collecting the material used to make them, and a church will then create the mats.
While the bags can be any color, the students decided to collect only yellow ones because gold is one of the school’s colors. Once the students have the yellow bags, they have to turn them into plarn, which is then rolled into a ball. Once the ball reaches a certain size, they have enough plarn for one mat. Fleischner said the students originally hoped to collect enough material to make one mat but are now hoping to have enough for four mats.
While they are only asking for yellow bags, Fleischner said they have received other colors of bags, which they are also turning into plarn balls.
After the students started collecting bags, Fleischner said the project snowballed. Now, three Dollar General stores are collecting the bags with more stores showing interest in helping out. Two of the stores each donated an unopened box of bags to the club, each containing over 1,000 bags.
The club has also received support from other schools on campus; students from kindergarten to EAST to special needs classes have started collecting bags and drop-off stations have been placed in the high school library and front office.
A.C.E. President Lyca Steelman said she was surprised by how well the bag collecting has gone. She said by the first meeting after deciding to collect the bags, they had enough for a baseball-size ball. She said it is amazing to see how many bags they have had donated since then.
Fleischner said the goal is to deliver the four plarn balls to United Way before the last day of school.
