This Christmas, outdoor adventurers across Chattanooga might find a brand new bicycle, complete with a festive red bow, waiting for them next to the tree. Or, maybe the latest in tents is on their wish lists, the perfect gear for all those camping trips planned for 2015.
Whatever outdoor gear you have your heart set on receiving this year, you’d be surprised at how you can give back.
People in homelessness or on very low incomes across Chattanooga are in desperate need of the gear you may have no use for anymore-from tents to sleeping bags to bicycles.
Have gear you no longer use? Or, just want to buy something to help out your fellow man? Scenic City ARK could use the following to give out to the homeless and those in need:• Tents• Sleeping bags• Sleeping pads• Bicycles• Helmets• Bike chains and locks• Toboggans• Gloves• Socks• Blankets• Backpacks
“Camping gear-tents and sleeping bags-are huge, especially with the winter months coming up, and they’re one of the hardest things to get,” says Scenic City ARK Director Alan Cantrell. ARK stands for Acts of Random Kindness, and it’s just one of the local ministries that makes its way downtown to the Chattanooga Community Kitchen to hand out food and supplies each week.
“It’s a blessing and a very humbling experience to go downtown,” says ARK treasurer Angie Maddux. “I can’t imagine what people have been through to get where they are.”
Initially, the ministry just started out as a small group effort to serve up food every Sunday at the Community Kitchen, launching the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2013. Now, just past their one-year anniversary, the ministry feeds and gives supplies to anywhere from 130 to 200 people each weekend.
That first day at the Kitchen, Cantrell and other volunteers boiled hot dogs and handed them out. Cantrell recalls that right when they ran out of hot dogs, three more men walked up, needing a meal.
His heart sank because he knew another volunteer was already dumping the water out and starting to clean up, when that volunteer noticed exactly three more hot dogs at the bottom of the pot.
That’s often how it works with a ministry like this, he says. Just when you think you won’t have enough or supplies won’t come through, they do-from a fellow volunteer driving up with a heaping truck-full of fresh Italian food to a friendly stranger stopping by with a carload of blankets and backpacks.
“It’s been an amazing ride. Some of the things we’ve seen are just short of a walk-on-water miracle for us,” says Cantrell. “We’ve wanted to expand a little bit into other areas and that’s where the bikes came in.”
He explains that Scenic City ARK didn’t only want to help the homeless, the volunteers wanted to help anyone in need as a form of homelessness prevention.
“The ones we are trying to reach with the bicycles are those with jobs who can’t afford a car, maybe can’t even afford rent, and who maybe live close to downtown,” he says. For instance, Cantrell met a man who wasn’t homeless and had a job, but he couldn’t afford a car. He had to walk two hours to get to work, and then walk two hours back.
Cantrell asked him, “What if I got you a bike?”
The man said it would cut down his commute to a half hour. So Cantrell found a bike to give the man, and since the ministry has given four or five bikes away, he says.
“It’s a learning process, though,” says Cantrell. “I’ve kept up with [the man with the bike] and eventually the bike got stolen. We learned, if you give a bicycle away, you have to give them a chain and a lock with it.”
Though there’s a lot of learning and even more work still to do, anything helps, he says. So as you are making room for that gear you got for Christmas, look around and find something to give back.
It might make the difference someone really needs.