Kids in Canada Wrap Street Poles with Coats to Help the Homeless Stay Warm

As the holiday season is approaching and we can already feel the Christmas spirit blowing in the air, many people get inspired to do something good to help others and make this world a bit better place.

Tara Smith-Atkins from Nova Scotia, Canada, does something amazing every year to help those in need. She reaches out to the local community and asks for donations of old clothes. She then distributes them on the streets so that homeless people can stay warm in the cold winter days.

Smith-Atkins says she came up with the idea to deliver warm clothes to the streets when she together with her husband went to Toronto last December and saw how many people were in need.

“It was a little bit overwhelming and definitely unsettling the amount of poverty and homelessness there,” she told CBCnews.

This year, this amazing woman mobilized a group of children to help her tie coats and other items of winter clothes to street poles in Halifax so that homeless people could easily find them.

Smith-Atkins called for people in the local community to donate coats and other warm clothing and got really great results in just a couple of weeks.

When enough clothes were collected, it was time to deliver them to the streets. Together with her 8-year-old daughter and seven of her friends, they dressed up street poles with coats, mittens and scarves.

Each item had a tag on it that was saying the following:

“I am not lost! If you are stuck out in the cold, please take me to keep warm!”

According to Smith-Atkins, this gesture was not only meant to help the homeless but also teach the kids an important lesson.

“They definitely learned the importance of it,” she said. “When we got back in the car after an hour on the street, they were all freezing and crying for the heater to be on and complaining because they were cold. And they were bundled up.”

Smith-Atkins is planning to repeat a ‘coat drive’ next year. She also wants to put a $5 fast food voucher in each coat pocket so the homeless can get a hot meal.

Image credit: Tara Smith-Atkins