Literacy Live!

AmeriCorps Members Lend a Hand at A-SPAN

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Yesterday for our Martin Luther King Day of Service, my fellow AmeriCorps members and I cleaned and organized at the Arlington Street Peoples’ Assistance Network ( A-SPAN), which is a homelessness assistance group in Arlington, Virginia. A-SPAN offers a plethora of programs and services: case management; employment counseling; Permanent Supportive Housing ; Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing; bagged meals; and an Emergency Winter Shelter.

I personally helped organize their clothing room where clients can pick out new clothes from donations. I also helped organize donated items to determine whether they were appropriate. Unfortunately, some people use organizations such as this as a dumping ground for their old, strained, ripped, and otherwise un-wearable clothing. The phrase “good enough for the homeless” flashes through some peoples’ minds as they drop off their soiled clothes,  but I’m glad that others take the alternative view that individuals, who are homeless or facing homelessness, deserve as good clothing as you or me. By the end of the day, the AmeriCorps team left A-SPAN with a clean, organized, and respectable clothing room that I hope will make an individual’s life better, even if in a small way.

Catherine K. Ludwig
AmeriCorps Instructor
Literary Council of Northern Virginia
2855 Annandale Rd Falls Church VA 22042
(703) 237-0866
www.lcnv.org