Care Bags for our local Homeless

My name is Teagan, I’m a western Sydney local and together with my mum, Sonya, we make up care bags for our local homeless and displaced community members at Christmas time.

We facilitate the collection of donated essential items throughout the year and purchase items we run short of.

At the end of the year, we select a couple of local homeless support organisations to donate them to for distribution to those in need.

This year is our 9th year doing these bags and they are always extremely well received.

Some previous organisations that we have donated to include Wayside Chapel, Hawkesbury Helping Hands and Share the Dignity.

The items we typically include are listed below. All items we include are new and unopened.

- Travel sized shampoo and conditioner

- Travel sized body wash and lotion

- Travel sized sunscreen and hand sanitizer

- Hair combs, shower caps, hair ties

- Pocket sized packs of wipes and tissues

- Sanitary pads, tampons and disposal bags

- Individually packaged toothbrushes and toothpaste

- Individually packaged soap bars

- Packs of playing cards and small gift items

- Socks (mens and womens)

- Roll on deodorant (mens and womens)

- Washing detergent sheets or travel sized packs

- Cheap gift items such as sunglasses, nail polish, small notebooks and pens, small puzzle books, microfibre gym towels, wallets, small craft kits etc

- Individually wrapped lollies such as minties, candy canes, skittles, lollipops, jellybeans, Zappo and ghost drops, gummy bears, mentos, sherbies etc

This year especially, we have seen a significant rise in the number of people impacted by homelessness or displacement. The housing crisis has forced a large number of people out of their homes and onto the street in addition to those already doing it tough.

Our goal is to reach as many people in need as possible to make things just a tiny bit easier.

This is something that has grown so much over the years and now, looking toward the future, it’s something we hope to eventually offer year-round and not just at Christmas. We would love to have the ability to provide ready-made Care Bags to those in need, when they need. Things such as fires, floods, storms, financial hardship, domestic violence etc all contribute greatly to our local community members finding themselves displaced or homeless. It is our hope that during these extremely tough times in people’s lives, we can help just a little bit by providing some essentials.

To be able to grow this to year round, we will need adequate storage containers and shelving, funding to register our organisation and purchase additional items we may run low on.

Our Christmas bags this year have already started and we made up the first 151 but whilst there are some items we have plenty of to make more bags up, there are some items we’ve run out of! Toothbrushes, roll-on deodorants, tissues and small gifts are the items we need more of this year.

If you are in a position to do so, please consider donating to our cause and help us to help those in need!

Thank you so much!