Giving back to the communities around us is an important part of who we are at Spirit Cultural Exchange. As part of our Spirit Gives Back initiative, thirteen members of the Spirit Cultural Exchange team recently came together in Chicago for an afternoon of volunteering with Share Our Spare.
Our team visited Share Our Spare on September 24 for our second volunteer event of the year. It was our first time volunteering with Share Our Spare, and we were excited to learn more about its work supporting children and families in the Chicago community.
Supporting Families Through Share Our Spare
Share Our Spare provides essential resources to children from birth through age five and their families. The organization collects donations from community members and works with a large network of partners to distribute those items to families who need them.
One of the resources Share Our Spare focuses on is diapers. According to the organization, 1 in 2 children in Chicago does not have enough diapers. Share Our Spare helps address this need by accepting diaper donations, including diapers from opened packages that can be repackaged and distributed.
The organization also accepts larger and specialized items that may be difficult to donate elsewhere, including car seats and other baby essentials.
During our visit, we were impressed by the incredible variety and quality of the items being prepared for distribution and by how efficiently the Share Our Spare team and volunteers keep everything organized.
Creating 63 Maternity Clothing Kits
For our volunteer project, the Spirit Cultural Exchange team focused on sorting and preparing maternity clothing for families in the community.
We quality-checked donated clothing and organized it by size before putting together complete maternity clothing kits. Each kit included a variety of essentials, including a couple of pairs of pants, shirts, a dress, a bra, a belly band, and a handwritten note of encouragement.
By the end of our volunteer session, our team had assembled 63 maternity clothing kits!
The project was hands-on, collaborative, and (most importantly) fun. The energy among our team was high as we sorted clothing, prepared kits, and decorated the handwritten notecards that would accompany them.
We were also able to see firsthand how much work goes into preparing donated items so they can reach families in a useful and meaningful way.
A Community We’re Excited to Support
After completing our project, the Share Our Spare team gave us a tour of the facility and shared more about the organization’s volunteer opportunities. We were especially excited to learn that Share Our Spare welcomes volunteers as young as six years old to help with tasks such as sorting toys.
The experience showed us how accessible volunteering with Share Our Spare can be and how many different ways there are to contribute. We’re grateful to the Share Our Spare team for welcoming us and showing us the impact that organized community support can have.
We hope to return for another volunteer day in the future, and we encourage others in the Chicago community to explore ways they can get involved with Share Our Spare and other local organizations.
At Spirit Cultural Exchange, giving back is one more way we can build connections and contribute to the communities where our team members, Host Organizations, and participants live and work.