LOWELL — It wasn’t a rock live performance, however the vitality felt electrical when incoming Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll entered the cafeteria of Lowell High School Wednesday afternoon.
It was their final cease on “Team Up Massachusetts,” a group service-oriented tour that included LHS’s Catie’s Closet.
The crowd surged ahead and enveloped the pair, telephones had been held aloft to snap pictures, whereas others stood on tables and chairs to get a greater take a look at the incoming management to Beacon Hill. Healey and Driscoll, who can be sworn in on Thursday, will function the nation’s first all-female governor and lieutenant governor duo.
After greeting native and state-level dignitaries, workers and college students, Healey and Driscoll set to work, grabbing reusable buying baggage and filling them with personal-care merchandise stocked excessive on an extended row of tables.
“This week was about community service around this great state,” Healey mentioned. “There’s a lot of need — food, housing, clothing — and Kim and I recognize that, and we want to be ready to deliver for people, especially those who are struggling right now.”
Catie’s Closet, a spot the place the clothes and hygiene wants of unhoused college students or these going through different financial hardships could be met on the college they attend, was chosen to symbolize the incoming administration’s deal with making the commonwealth extra inexpensive, bringing communities collectively and giving again to these in want.
“It’s great to be in a place that is helping students, particularly students in a Gateway City,” Driscoll mentioned. “As the mayor of Salem, I know how (important it is) to get what you need in school. Schools are more than just a place that’s educating kids — we’re thinking about the whole child and that’s what this project symbolizes to us.”
The 1,000 baggage included typical objects similar to shampoo, cleaning soap, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrushes, however additionally they have what Catie’s Closet founder Anne-Marie Sousa known as objects to handle “period poverty.”
“The number of days of school that females miss due to not having the money to purchase products for their periods is unacceptable,” she mentioned. “Our main mission is to keep kids in school and reduce absenteeism, so this became a sub-project for us. Young women at LHS can pick out clothing and period supplies for free.”
Sousa is the mom to Catie Bisson, a 2008 LHS graduate who died in 2010 after a prolonged battle with Loeys-Dietz syndrome, a uncommon genetic illness that impacts connective tissue. Bisson was 20, however had already envisioned a spot the place college students would get their wants met. Her household based the primary Catie’s Closet in an unused room at LHS in 2010.
The Dracut-based nonprofit now has areas in 120 faculties in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
“This is very overwhelming to be honest with you,” Sousa mentioned, with teary eyes as she watched a minimum of 100 volunteers assemble baggage. “The governor-elect was presented with some options, and we were one that she chose. To bring that kind of awareness to what we do — it’s humbling. It’s more special that I can even say.”
LHS freshmen and Student Council members Sireiyutta Yam and Shyleen Mtiziwa had been a number of the pupil volunteers tying greeting tags to accomplished baggage. Yam got here to Lowell from Siem Reap, Cambodia, three years in the past; Mtiziwa is newly arrived from Zimbabwe.
“I am so new — I came to this country four months ago,” Mtiziwa mentioned. “People are so nice. When I saw the invitation to volunteer, I thought, ‘I want to do something. I want to help people.’”
Healey mentioned that was the community-service side she was searching for when placing collectively the five-city tour that additionally visited Springfield, Worcester, Taunton and South Yarmouth.
“While campaigning, I really enjoyed seeing young people take the initiative out there in their community leading on all sorts of projects and endeavors,” Healey mentioned. “It’s sad that Catie is no longer with us, but her initiative — and her family’s initiative — starting something like this to help other young people, is really beautiful, and that’s what brings us here today.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”