More than 1,000 items donated to Greensburg shelter by tech school students

A Greensburg emergency shelter this month received more than 1,000 items donated by students at the Central Westmoreland Career and Technical Center.

The donations to the Welcome Home shelter were part of a community service project started by senior Lexi Puskar.

“I said, ‘I think that would be good’ … if we got toiletry items, anything that somebody would need when they come to the shelter,” said cosmetology teacher and SkillsUSA advisor Linda Iezzi, who suggested the Welcome Home shelter knowing that people have faced additional hardships over the past year due to the covid-19 pandemic.

Collection bins and donation signs were placed around the New Stanton-based vo-tech. For two weeks, students and staff collected items like shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, curling irons, socks, t-shirts and more.

“We put it on Facebook so anybody could donate if they wanted to,” Iezzi said. “Everyone told their families because I said you can go around and ask your families if they’d like to donate, anybody that’d be willing to participate. Some people just went to Bath and Body Works and bought a bunch of items.”

In the end, more than 1,000 items were packed into five cardboard boxes and taken to the shelter.

For Tracy Scott, housing supervisor for Connect Inc., which owns the shelter, the donations were a reflection of how helpful the community has been.

“That was a big donation,” Scott said. “It’s been rough over the past year. We never closed our doors all the last year, we stayed open, we stayed running.

“Even though donations slowed down a little bit, our community here in Westmoreland is awesome. They made sure all of our needs were met, all of our clients were met with anything that they needed.”

The shelter, located on South Maple Avenue, assists an average of 250 women, children and men per year, according to the Welcome Home website.

Across the state, 13,375 people were homeless in 2020, which was a 1.3% increase from 2019, according to data from U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That means that about 10 in every 10,000 people in the state experienced homelessness last year.

Scott, who noted donations from schools typically come around the holidays, said the products received from the community are used to help every person who comes to the shelter.

“Every donation helps, every donation counts,” she said. “We’re humbled. It’s a humbling experience because people are going through so much.”

Iezzi added, “I’m proud that the kids came together and did this in this rough year. It’s been a rough year for everybody.”