Volunteer Spotlight: Grace Dunzo
This month our 'Story of Impact' focuses on Grace, a local high school student who recently made more than 600 hygiene and food bags to donate to the Free Store!
COVID-19 kept her from volunteering in person, but that didn't stop Grace Dunzo from trying to support her neighbors in need. Grace, a 16 year old student from Durham School of the Arts, wanted to find a way to help people experiencing homelessness from a distance. In 2019, Grace completed a research project focused on gentrification, evictions, and the homeless crisis in her eighth-grade year and wanted to put her research into practice. After completing her research, she started creating hygiene and food bags to distribute to the unsheltered folks she had met. She took time to sit, talk, and build relationships with her neighbors without homes to find out what would be most helpful to include in her bags for distribution. Then she partnered with some local organizations, including Open Table Ministry, to distribute her bags.
This year, knowing the difficulties the pandemic has caused for people experiencing homelessness, she wanted to find a way to help her neighbors in need again and use that same knowledge to help people in a way that would keep her and her family safe. So she and a few friends gathered masked and socially distanced in her backyard to put together 600 hygiene and food bags for distribution at OTM’s Free Store. She bought all the items herself and found that “the hardest part was getting the right quantities at the right price.” Her bags included shampoo, soap, combs, granola bars, water bottles, and other necessary items. One of her favorite parts about creating these bags was being able to bring together a few friends in a safe, socially distanced way to help vulnerable community members.
Grace knows that providing necessary items, like food and hygiene staples, to people experiencing homelessness makes a big difference. When asked what drove her to keep helping her neighbors who are experiencing homelessness, she reflected and said, “it could have been you or me given different circumstances.” She knows, after all her interviews, that “it’s not possible to do everything on your own, everybody needs a little help sometimes.” We are grateful for Grace’s generosity, determination, and compassion for her fellow neighbors!