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Hillside Court volunteers help out homeless veterans

Le Sueur News-Herald - 3/23/2017

A few Le Sueur seniors are helping homeless veterans keep warm at night.

The residents of Hillside Court Apartments have been gathering plastic bags and helping to turn them into sleeping mats for the veterans.

Monica Muchow, who manages the apartment building, said a group of five to 10 volunteers at Hillside Court help to create the mats out of plastic bags. The volunteers take in plastic bags, often donated by stores or other city residents, return them to their original on-shelf state, cut them and turn them into "plarn," or plastic yarn.

The Le Sueur men and women gather at 10 a.m. Tuesday mornings to get to work on the bags.

Donna Hague, one of the volunteers and Hillside Court resident, said they have been making the mats since last September, and have slowly worked on gathering up plastic bags.

"I like to do it because it goes to help the homeless," she said.

Each of the volunteers said they had family members who had been in the military and that family connection was part of what drew them to the project.

The volunteers are missing a crocheter to help turn that plarn into the full sleeping mats, so instead the balls of plarn are brought to Holy Redeemer Church in Montgomery. There, more volunteers from the Catholic Women's Organization turn the plarn into large mats.

The mats are then brought to the Twin Cities or Faribault, where they are distributed to homeless veterans. The mats, easy to clean and carry due to their plastic construction, are meant to help veterans stay warm by separating them from the ground while sleeping or sitting. The mats are also large enough to wrap completely around a person to work as a blanket.

The 6 feet by 3.5 feet finished mats take about 600 plastic bags to create. An average of 15 women are involved with the process of creating each mat, which take 50 hours to complete over about a month.

Muchow said the large number of bags needed to create a mat makes the project environmentally friendly, repurposing bags that would otherwise be thrown out to be put into a landfill.

President of the Catholic Women's Organization Cathy Herrmann said the mats have been used at the state capitol as an example of smart recycling that could help reduce harmful pollution.

"We are doing a good deed for the environment as well," Hermann said.

Herrmann said the volunteers at Hillside Court are just one part of a system including women at the church, students from local schools and various other volunteers who help to get the mats to veterans. Not all of the volunteer groups have someone who knows how to crochet, so some just gather up bags to bring to the church.

Originally, all of the mats were headed to the Twin Cities, where they were distributed to homeless veterans who had nowhere to go; however, a rising homeless population in southern Minnesota has prompted the mission to switch their focus to Faribault.

Muchow said that Hillside Court is always looking for more volunteers, whether someone wants to help make the plarn, crochet, cut or just drop off a load of bags for the project.

"Like anything that you do to make the world a better place, it makes you feel good," she said.