St. Helen’s and All Saints youth team up to give well stocked backpacks to homeless teens

On Dec. 6, 2020, the youth and their leaders from St. Helen’s Anglican Church and All Saints Westboro came together to create backpacks full of supplies for homeless youth. The two groups collected materials for the backpacks, including hairbrushes and hair elastics, socks, towels, and the backpacks themselves. 

This was done with funds raised by the youth, originally for CLAY, which was unable to happen in person this year. CLAY, or the Canadian Lutheran Anglican Youth gathering, is a conference for youth from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada that happens every two years. The past two years, the youth have been fundraising to be able to attend this event. Although CLAY only happened online this year, the CLAY organizers encouraged the youth to take part in the National Youth Project, which is focused on youth homelessness.

This is what sparked this project within the St. Helen’s youth group, The Branches. And by teaming up with All Saints Westboro, who had raised a lot more for CLAY than we did, we were able to achieve a lot more! Together, we were able to make 20 backpacks for Restoring Hope and 10 backpacks for Operation Come Home.

On that chilly Sunday morning, the two youth groups gathered in the St. Helens parking lot to assemble the backpacks. Despite the cold weather, the youth were eager to assemble the backpacks and get them to the homeless youth. We formed a circle of backpacks, and we each worked around the circle with the supplies we had brought. We had masks on and kept socially distanced, but it was still an awesome opportunity to get to know people from other youth groups and make a difference to other people of our age.

And I can tell you, seeing all the backpacks piled into one of the cars afterwards was really rewarding and gave us all a feeling of accomplishment.