UMassFive personal care drive supports local centers

May 30, 2023 | Bill Zito
bzito@thereminder.com

A recent UMassFive donation drive collected more than than 365 pounds of personal care products for distribution.
Reminder Publishing submitted photo

HADLEY — Three local organizations received contributions of much needed personal care products; the efforts of a donation drive coordinated by UMassFive College Federal Credit Union.

The Amherst Survival Center, The Gray House in Springfield and the Northampton Survival Center shared 365 pounds of items including soap, shampoo, menstrual products and diapers.

The March drive, involving the members and employees from the Hadley, Northampton and Springfield branches was highlighted in a UMassFive press release. “We’re so appreciative of our members and employees for donating personal care items to our annual drive,” said Cait Murray, Community Outreach Manager at UMassFive. “We know that personal care items in the Survival Center pantries may help people avoid making difficult trade-offs. Nobody should have to choose between food and toilet paper.”

The Amherst Survival Center offers an array of different services to assist people by providing basic needs and life services, among them food security with healthy options. Executive Director Lev BenEzra emphasized that some essentials are difficult to come by as they are frequently not available under other avenues of support.

“People also can’t use their SNAP benefits or things like that to buy personal care products so they can’t use those kinds of benefits and I think they’re just often forgotten in terms of their essential nature,” she said.

While food drives are not at all uncommon, Craig Boivin, vice president of Marking for the UMassFive College Federal Credit Union said making a choice between family meals and personal care should not be necessary.

“I think the personal care drive really came about because not everyone thinks about soap, shampoo, toothpaste as things that are of critical need for folks,” Boivin said. “When you really think about it and you go to the grocery store or wherever you’re buying them from and realize how expensive it is to buy shampoo, to buy some of those basic everyday things, a lot of the focus gets on food and rightfully so overall but to need them to make that tradeoff between personal hygiene versus a feeding your family type of thing, that was sort of the crux of wanting to do the personal care drive at a higher level.

BenEzra said the center has made personal care items available through their food pantry for several years.

“All of our personal care items that we distribute come to us via donation, whereas we do get a significant amount of food from the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts as well and there’s government funding that helps support that food that comes to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and then comes to us, plus all the different food drives that we do as well as recovery from area grocery stores,” BenEzra added.

She says toiletries and personal care products come from the drive efforts like their most recent one in March and they are highly requested items as people come through the pantry and the overall need continues to grow.

“We’re anticipating serving somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 individuals this year compared to just over 4,100 last year, a real increase in the need that we’re seeing,” BenEzra said.

The UMassFive drive is just one of many donation efforts taken on annually with the assistance of several area groups, BenEzra said. Each event is instrumental because they do not receive large, or direct corporate donations so the combination of smaller batch contributions is extremely important.

“On average, we probably have between five and 10 different drives going most months for any combination of food and personal care products and those kinds of things on varying scales,” BenEzra said.

UMassFive participates in several drives annually, including specific efforts from cold weather clothing and coats to children’s costumes for Halloween.

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