Community shows support through sock campaign

As temperatures start to drop across the Maritimes, donations continue to pick up at Maritime Tartan Company in Amherst, N.S.

“In a few days we’ve raised about 1000 pairs of socks for kids, women, men. We’ve got about 100 hats, 100 pairs of gloves already,” said co-owner, Dale Kearney.

“We’d like to get some Tim Horton’s gift cards and also some Amazon gift cards so we can buy some other personal needs for them.”

With a big focus on socks, Dale and his wife Sherrie started collecting donations near the beginning of November.

“People forget socks. A lot of people forget socks,” he said.

“They think jackets, like you said, jackets and stuff like that, but socks are always forgotten and they’re the number one requested item at shelters.”

The initiative started after seeing a call-out on social media from Dale’s hometown of New Waterford in Cape Breton.

The plan was to send 500 pairs over to help, but after their original goal was surpassed in the first few days, they expanded their mission.

“We’ve had donations come in from across the country,” said Kearney.

“We’ve had a couple of celebrities send us some socks, we’ve had Morgan Fairchild send us some socks, and we had the manager of Amazon Prime send us some socks, so it’s getting out there.”

Now with nearly 1000 socks collected so far, the Kearney’s plan to send another 500 pairs to Souls Harbour Rescue Mission in Halifax.

“Donations make all of the difference,” said Free Mart Coordinator, Shannon Kam.

“Everything that we give out here at free mart does come from donations from the community.”

She adds that socks are an essential donation no matter the time of year, but especially going into the winter months.

“We often take for granted the fact that we can change our socks each day if we want or that we can launder our socks, but a lot of people living in shelters, living in tents, living on the streets, they walk a lot, all day long and they don’t have multiple pairs of socks and they’re not able to launder their socks,” she said.

“So what that means is there also not really able to keep their feet dry and clean all of the time.”

On top of sock donations, she says the mission is currently in need of toiletries and more volunteers to help sort through the donations.

The Kearney’s are accepting donations until the end of November both in person to their store and through an amazon wish list.

With the original goal now blown out of the water, they now say they’ll take as many as they can get.

“We’re not in this for ourselves,” said Kearney.

“We’re just in to make people comfortable and I mean, there’s a lot of people in need this year and this is just a small way of doing something for them.”

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