Girls Fill Closet With Clothing For Others

Many teenagers consider shopping for trendy new clothes one of life’s top priorities. That’s not true of the high school seniors in Girl Scout Troop 382.

Rather than prowling the mall in search of the latest designer fashions, Troop 382 works to make sure that families on limited incomes have access to free clothing.

Through a partnership project with Deaconess Medical Center, they helped start Kid’s Closet, a program that provides free clothes for mothers and children who want or need them.

A year a half ago Sue Greenfelder, a case manager in the chemical dependency unit at Deaconess, started collecting the clothes to give to families she works with. Greenfelder visited garage sales, community centers, thrift stores and other hospitals in search of donations.

“It started with just a few clothes, then I got a closet, and then three closets,” Greenfelder says.

“Before long I had an enormous amount of clothes. It got to be a bit too much for one person to handle.”

She appealed to the hospital for more space to store the clothing. Her 21-year-old daughter, Sarah Sundby, recommended that she look for a Girl Scout troop to take over Kid’s Closet as a community service project.

Sundby had been a Girl Scout for seven years before earning her Gold Award in 1994, the same year she graduated from East Valley High School. The Gold Award, given to scouts for outstanding community service, is the highest honor a Girl Scout can achieve.

Greenfelder contacted the Girl Scout Council Office in Spokane. That’s how she found the young women in Troop 382.

“We started out with one room in the hospital, with just a bunch of clothes in boxes,” says 17-year-old Leslie Mitchell, a senior at Central Valley High School and one of the scouts working on Kid’s Closet.

“We separated them into a girls room and a boys room, and sorted everything by size. Now it looks like a little store.”

Greenfelder publicized Kid’s Closet in hospital and community center newsletters, and the Girl Scouts developed a clothing request form for families to fill out.

Now Mitchell and her peers are searching for another troop to manage the project after they graduate from high school, and from Girl Scouting, later this spring. “We definitely want to keep this going,” she says.

Mitchell and two other Girl Scouts from Troop 382 will receive the Gold Award for their work on Kid’s Closet.

If you’d like access to the free children’s clothing at Kid’s Closet, or if you have clothes to donate, call 458-7314.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: Created in support of the Spokane County Health Improvement Partnership (HIP), Discoveries highlights people working to improve community health or well-being. If you have a discovery that deserves recognition, call HIP at 482-2557 or Elana Ashanti Jefferson at 459-5419.