Number of Participants: 6
Hours Donated: 4
Value of Time Served: $203
Event Type: Poverty & Homelessness
Sport: Schools
Date: May 3, 2023
Location:
Central Catholic High School
Hampshire Street, Lawrence
MA
About:
The sock drive is an annual event run by the National Honor Society (this year was year 2). We have over 100 athletes involved in the National Honor Society at CCHS. The drive was started last year by Ava Korbani ’22 (currently at Boston College), an NHS officer, captain of the gymnastics team, and a diver on the swim and dive team at CCHS. It was continued by this year’s officers, Ranjana Ramesh, Alex Willard, Delia Sullivan, and Jonelle Echendu, and moderators Kate Smith (me) and Kaiya Paula. Alex is a 3 season distance runner and captain.
The goal of the drive is to help community members in need. This year the members of the NHS at CCHS collected over 2000 pairs of new socks. The socks have been donated (or will be donated) to Lazarus House in Lawrence, the Red Cross Disaster Relief program, The Community Giving Tree in Lawrence, and Debbie’s Treasure Chest in Lawrence. The organizations all help community members with basic needs.
The tennis team requested to donate some of the socks to the Red Cross through Coach Reed, the girls tennis coach of the Haverhill girls team, because they had heard of his volunteer work, specifically how he responds to disaster situations where people have been displaced from their homes and helps them get housing and basic needs. We donated about 300 pairs of socks on this day—men’s, women’s and children’s socks. (As an aside: Tennis is unusual in that the JV squad does not have matches. Coach Reed invites CCHS JV to a scrimmage match every year and it is a fun day with the Haverhill and Central JV teams.)
There are 6 members of the CCHS NHS on the varsity tennis team—captains Grace Blanchette ‘23 and Megan Washburn ’24 (pictured in the tweet), and players Kaya Asmar ‘25, Alessandra Sacchetti ‘24, Melina Panagiotakopoulos ‘25, and Khanh-Han Nguyen ‘25. The time commitment for the sock drive is just a few hours for most NHS members—buying/collecting socks, counting the collections, posting on-going results school wide, and bringing socks to donation places.
Here is an article I found on the Red Cross effort and Dave Reed, the coach of Haverhill girls tennis.
Information provided by Kate Smith