Every Sunday night, October through April, PADS volunteer Margaret Epperson provides shelter to 30 homeless men in the basement of Flossmoor Community Church.
On Flossmoor’s MLK Day of Service on Jan. 21, the church basement was filled with familiar faces.
“I’ve been coming a couple years now,” PADS client Brian Fulwiley said. “It’s beautiful. The gifts, the boots, the clothes, the hygiene products. It’s wonderful all that Miss Margaret does. Flossmoor is the only site that has done this much for guys in the shelter.”
Another PADS client compared Epperson to a “storm, fighting for me.”
Epperson says the work she does for underserved communities was hard-wired into her from childhood.
“I was raised this way. My mom would take us to senior citizen’s bedsides to sing to them. This is in my DNA,” she said. “I’ve always done social justice work, including refugee resettlement. When I started coming to FCC, I decided to check out helping the homeless. Something shifted in me, and I realized that I’m meant to do this.”
After seeing that many of those in the homeless community do not receive routine medical care, Epperson decided to become a nurse.
“I want to do some sort of mobile nursing, where I got to the people instead of having the people come to me,” she said. “In the homeless community, the focus is food and shelter. They only seek medical help if it’s an emergency. I’m leaning towards being a psychiatric nurse. There is a high number of mentally ill people on the streets because the state closed a lot of the mental health facilities.”
This year’s Day of Service included a dozen projects in Flossmoor and nearby communities. Hundreds of volunteers flocked to service sites despite the cold and snow.
The Sunday night before the Day of Service, H-F National Honor Society (NHS) members earned volunteer hours by helping set up a pop-up shop of donated winter men’s clothing for PADS clieints.
PADS volunteer Palas Bowers said Flossmoor’s donations were especially helpful this year.
Photos by Mary Compton/H-F Chronicle
“We receive the clothing, size it, sort it, and hang it. By the time we finish, it’s a little pop-up store. The guys can come in and find whatever they need,” she said. “We also get donations of toiletries, and I specifically ask for travel sizes. For a lot of these guys, whatever they have in their back pack is all they have. We probably got 300 pieces of travel size toiletries alone. It was nice that the community listened.”
A couple blocks away, NHS volunteers were packing up book donations at the Western Avenue School library for the Literacy Awareness Project’s partnership with Pangea Education Development, a nonprofit committed to sustainable education in Uganda.
Andrew Bauer, former Western Avenue teacher and founder of Pangea, says the Literacy Awareness Project focuses on literacy because lacking school funding is not the only barrier to education.
“We saw that even when schools have funding, many of them still lack the in-and-out factors that affect students’ education. So, we started focusing on literacy,” Bauer explained. “There are only 46 public libraries in all of Uganda, that’s about one for every one million people. We started our mobile library service, similar to a Netflix subscription, to address the accessibility problem. We bike to these homes with a steel crate attached, carrying books. Mobile librarians deliver four books per child, once a week.”
At Flossmoor Village Hall, H-F NHS member Jalyn White said that her motivation to support Jack and Jill, an organization of African American mothers, in its food drive for Respond Now, was founded on Dr. King’s legacy.
“It’s important to commemorate Dr. King with acts of service,” White said. “Also, we recognize that we need to continue to work towards his dream of helping everyone out no matter their race, religion or sexuality.”