OVP Oct/Nov final

Hello OVPers,

The PR committee is bringing to you an update of OVP activities for the months of October and early November. Subchairs Sujata (PR and fundraising), Aditya (food), Dan (clothing), and Saikrishna (outreach) have kindly provided a summary of their committee's recent accomplishments. Without further ado:

Clothing:

"Our overriding goal is to meet the clothing needs of the homeless population in East Boston. We have two methods of achieving this goal: first, we throw a clothing drive every semester to collect clothes; and second, we keep the clothes well organized in order to facilitate their distribution. When the demand for particular garments rises, such as warm jackets and new socks in the winter, we are ready to address that demand.

A couple weeks ago, all of us met up and reorganized the clothing in the OVP closet. In the process, we unearthed a lot of warm clothing that had been stored away for the summer. Also, we are throwing our clothing drive between December 1-5. Our advertising campaign is underway. We hope that students who go home for thanksgiving will be able to bring back and donate extra warm clothing. Concurrently with the clothing drive, one member of our committee is contacting thrift stores and discount shops to request a donation of any clothing that doesn't sell. In summary, we soon hope to have more clothing in the coffers for distribution to the homeless population."

Fundraising:

"Currently the Fundraising committee is having a T shirt sale to raise money for OVP. They look pretty snazzy, designed by our very own Lizzy Wilson. We've gotten quite a few responses already, and hopefully they keep coming in!" Overall, we have collected money for 92 shirts, which brings us to $644 raised!

Food:

"We have been involved in a number of different things over the past month. It's basically our job to ensure that we have enough food to give out during our van trips, and to acquire food supplies in a timely manner (and to also store such and keep an accurate inventory). In terms of specifics, we usually go out to the greater Boston food bank once a month, where we get canned food and other supplemental food items. In addition, on the day of the run, we usually coordinate with Chequers so that we can benefit from their weekly donations of rice and soup (usually two different flavors). One additional thing that we looked into this year were bread donations from a third party donor. The idea was that the bread donors would deliver fresh bread every Sunday, and that rotating members of the Food Committee would be out to receive the donations and store them in our shared space. This worked for about two weeks, but we ran into a few unforeseen problems. For one, there was too much bread being delivered, more so than could have been given out during the runs. This lead to a storage issue due to the limited space we have in the basement. We're working on setting the delivery date closer to Thursday (as opposed to Sundays) and reducing the quantity of bread delivered so as to maximize our food distribution efficiency.

In terms of the future, we were also thinking of starting a food tracking/inventory system. This would entail taking stock of every food item in the storage room at regular intervals (ex. every week), and also keeping track of how much food is given out during the runs (ex. total number of canned products handed out). We're setting up a system to make this go as smoothly and effortlessly as possible."

Outreach:

"The outreach committee serves to increase awareness of resources that the city of Boston offers to under-served populations. From medical and psychiatric resources to food, shelter, and employment services, the collected information is organized by the outreach committee into binders, stickers, and business cards that can be offered to OVP clients upon request. For the Fall semester, the outreach committee discussed two distinct initiatives.

The first is a comprehensive look at the content and delivery of the resources we have collected. While the committee feel that it was important to keep the resources up-to-date, they also want to make sure to make sustainable changes that easily by revised and updated by future committees. They also want to make the binder more user-friendly in an effort to increase access to this wonderful collection. More specifically, members of this committee have taken on specific categories of resources that they will review to ensure that things are up to date. Towards the end of the semester, they will put these resources together and work on the design of the binder.

A second initiative that we are working on implementing, is taking stock of which resources are requested during our van trips. We are hoping to use this information to better understand how to organize the binder and how to better implement the outreach aspect of our weekly trips. The outreach committee loves OVP!!"

That about covers it for October and November. Have a happy Thanksgiving to everyone in OVP!
--OVP PR committee