How To Serve A Homeless Person: Guide to Gift Bags

We can help a homeless person by serving him/her food, a blanket and/or necessary items. It's a pretty simple and wonderful thing to do.

In this article, I would like to propose a way to share items with homeless people. This distribution method of serving an unhoused person has worked for Children Helping Poor and Homeless People volunteers for over twenty-two years. I will discuss "the charitable giving of food" in detail in a later article.

Let's start from the beginning - we'd like to share something with a homeless person/people, but what should we share and how can we do share it?

First, we ask ourselves, what would we like to share with those in need. Not sure? On our website, www.chphp.com, there is a "Can You Help?" bittpm which, once clicked on, will reveal a number of suggestions of how to help.

One of our favorite projects is to assemble one or more Gift Bags, also known as, Survival Kits or Toiletry Bags. The goal of this project is to fill a bag(s) with new hotel/motel size toiletries and then give them to homeless people.

Although any bag or container can be used, we suggest using gallon zip lock bags for a number of reasons: they are big enough to fit a lot of items; a homeless person can reuse the bag; and because the top of the bag can be securely closed, the car/transportation vehicle is safe from spillage.

Having selected Gift Bags as our project, we can then think about the toiletry items we want to include in each Gift Bag. This is a very important part of this project because we are raising our own awareness. We can let our minds wonder and imagine what personal items a homeless person could use. We might even ask ourselves what personal items we would want if we were homeless.

For more ideas of personal items to include in the Gift Bag, we can refer to a list of just some of these items on our website, www.chphp.com and click on the " "Can You Help?" button.

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