Community Action and Service (CAS) held their first event of the year, a t-shirt drive, from Oct. 7 – Oct. 11 and collected five boxes full of shirts. The shirts will be used to make diapers for children in Haiti.

The idea for the drive came from director of the theater program, Eric Severson after he took a trip to Des Moines, Iowa. His friend Marilyn Johnson told him about the Covenant Presbyterian Church’s initiative to repurpose old shirts into diapers for children. “She told me about the initiative and I was instantly intrigued,” Severson said.

After hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Dorian (2019), Haiti was left with a lot of damage and displacement. Many people lost their houses and all their possessions. Despite all the loss, the government provided very little aid, and many people are still struggling to find a place to live. The idea for the cloth diapers came from the idea of simple aid that we can provide that the government isn’t providing.

Severson approached the members of Community Action and Service or CAS about his idea for the drive.

“Community Action and Service has always sought out engaging and thoughtful ways to give back to our community as well as the world, and this seemed like a perfect fit for this project” Severson said.

CAS started a bin in the Huss for people to donate shirts as their first event of the year. “CAS is really happy with the amount of t-shirts collected during this drive, and we think that the t-shirts are going to a good cause that the whole school should know about,” CAS co-president Annika Rock said

The shirts will be sent to Covenant Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa, where they will be sown and repurposed into cloth diapers. They will then be sent to an organization who will distribute cloth diapers to people in Haiti who can benefit from them.

This article was updated on Nov. 27, 2019, for formatting.