Crochet for Charity and How to Get Involved | Podcast Episode #45

Episode Transcript

Brittany:
Well, hey there. Welcome to episode number 45 of the BHooked podcast and the first episode of 2018. I’m so excited you’re here. Before I kick things off today, I want to say Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I hope you’re motivated, inspired, rejuvenated, everything you need to tackle 2018.

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about crocheting for charity, why you should get involved, some organizations you can get involved with, and all of this is to help inspire you to take on the Crochet Challenge for Warm Up America 2018. This is the third annual, I’m going to give you some sneak peeks here because I know that gosh, so many of you have asked me about this. When is it going to start? We’re a little bit behind from where we were last year, but that’s okay. I’m taking a little bit more time to prepare to make sure this event is a success, and I will share all the details I can with you today, and you’ll hear a lot more about it in the coming weeks at BeHookedCrochet.com.

Before we get into that, I want to share a goal of mine that I have for 2018. One of my biggest shortcomings is that I didn’t make enough time for myself. And so when goal setting for 2018, I recognized that shortcoming and I was able to figure out a way that I could improve that. So I’m sharing with you today as a way to not only hold myself accountable but to maybe encourage some of you to take on this little challenge with me.

Well, that is to consume or to read one book per month, at least one book per month. I really think that this goal is going to allow me to not only grow as a person, to just expand my vocabulary, to help me as a writer, but it’s also going to make sure that I am always finding time for myself, right? We have to sit down to read these books depending on the choice of book that you read. You could be growing while you’re making this time for yourself. For me, it just seems like a win-win situation and I think it could be for you too.

I will definitely be the first to admit that finding the time to read can be really difficult when you have pressing deadlines, you’re busy at work, you have family responsibilities. I get that. I struggle with it too. But the tool that I have found recently that has kind of helped me to realize that I can do this, that I can find the time for myself to read at least one book per month, well, this tool is Audible. I’ve talked about it a couple of times before on the podcast. It’s super relatable now as well.

And if you want to join me on this journey of reading or consuming one book each month in 2018, then you can use Audible too. If you find yourself short for time, if you find yourself needing to multitask while still meeting your goals, Audible can help you with that if this is a goal that you choose for yourself. Be Hooked podcast listeners can get a free 30-day trial and their first book is completely free.

Well, this month in January, my book is called The Fringe Hours by Jessica Turner, and it focuses on how we can make time for ourselves and why it’s not only okay to do so, but why that’s necessary to be our best selves. So I thought that was incredibly fitting because I want to make time for myself by reading and I’m learning how to make time for myself right here off the bat, the first book of the year.

So join me in this challenge, if you will. Start your free trial at BeHookedCrochet.com slash Audible. Download your first book completely for free. And then tell me about it on Twitter. It’ll really work as kind of having an accountability partner. We can just form sort of a support group on Twitter. So my handle is at BeHookedCrochet.

And you don’t have to sign up for this Audible trial to join me in this challenge. I know that listening to books isn’t for everybody. Sometimes it’s harder for us to listen and we don’t necessarily get out books of what we’re listening to the same as what we would if we were reading. So you don’t have to sign up for this Audible trial to join me in this challenge, but definitely reach out to me on Twitter because I want to know and encourage whoever is going to be with me on this.

Now getting back to business, this episode as well as next week’s episode were completely inspired by the upcoming third annual Crochet Challenge for Warm Up America. This is a really fun way for us to kind of join together and make a real difference in someone’s life. It’s a challenge that I have organized. Now this will be the third year. Together we have donated hundreds of blankets to families in need and we’re going to continue that and make it even bigger this year.

Well, I’m giving you a sneak peek right here on the podcast because as of right now, this information isn’t available anywhere else on the web. I’ve teased you a little bit on Instagram, but as of now, I’m still ironing out the details for the challenge. There’s a lot of moving parts here, a lot of things that I have to get together, and I don’t want to throw it together so quickly and leave room for error.

This year, we’ll be working on a lapgan-sized blanket using Caron one-pound yarn. And I know there are some sales circulating around for Caron. I was actually at Joann’s yesterday. They have it for sale for $6.99 for one ball, which is good. It’s marked down from $9.99. Pricing may vary by location. That’s what it is here where I’m located. And so any opportunity I can save money, you know I’m doing so.

You will see me post about the challenge over the next couple of weeks. We’re going to talk about it even more on the podcast next week. But a couple of dates that I want you to keep in your mind is January 14th, because that’s going to be the day that I release all of the supplies, all of the important dates, the Facebook group will go live, and we’re going to start a giveaway for you so you could potentially win the supplies to make your blanket.

The other day I want to let you know about is January 27th. That will be the launch of the challenge. That’ll be the first day that the pattern and tutorial are available. That will be your cue to hit the ground running, to finish your blanket within the deadline and ship it to Warm Up America.

So keep an eye out on the homepage at BeHookedCrochet.com for more information about the Warm Up America challenge. Also on my Facebook page, Instagram, I’ll be posting updates there too if this is something that you’re interested in. I encourage you to find a challenge buddy. Recruit somebody that you can work with together so that not only you can have an accountability partner, but we can send as many blankets as possible to the foundation to help as many families as we possibly can.

While the Warm Up America Challenge is only one way that you can get involved for crocheting for charity, I’m gonna be giving you several different examples of organizations that you can get involved with today. And I’m gonna have a ton of links and resources to do so. I wanna make sure that this process is absolutely as easy as it possibly can be. I don’t want you to have to feel like you need to memorize things and write them down. I do all of that for you.

I found some organizations that are not only incredible, but they make it easy for you to donate to. I’m going to highlight those here today, and I’m going to share with you the links, the specific links that you need to get involved with these organizations. You’ll find all of that information on the show notes page. And for this episode, that is BeHookedCrochet.com slash session045. Remember that URL. That’s all you have to memorize. You’ll find all the resources on that page.

Before we figure out where we’re going to donate to and who we’re going to get involved for, I think there is one critical step or critical realization that we need to make, and that is to figure out why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Any of us can do a quick Google search, right? We can all type in crochet for charity or charities to donate crochet to, and we’ll find dozens, hundreds, maybe even more results of places that we can donate to. But what’s missing in that is the why, right? I mean, anybody can do that. In order to feel motivated to do something for somebody else, we need to find our reason why we’re doing that. And then we don’t even have to try to be motivated. It just happens naturally.

When I was in search of my reason, I really didn’t have to look further than a life event that happened for me when I was really young. I had an aunt who was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was a very young child, and my entire memory of her was fighting cancer. This incredible battle against this thing called cancer that I had no idea what it was. I remember thinking it was some kind of monster.

And eventually, when I was 13 years old, after she had gone through a world of heartache and pain and remission and relapse, I was right there in the room when she took her last breath. I was 13 at this time, and so I had a better understanding of what cancer was. But more importantly, I knew how much I hated it for taking such a wonderful person from this world, for tearing my family into bits.

And it was at that time that I knew that I was going to devote some part of my life to making that situation really better for somebody else because I didn’t want anybody else to go through what our family was going through.

I took that passion into what I studied at school. She is the reason why I went into healthcare, why I was so interested in learning about cancer and cell biology, and I just wanted to know how all of that stuff worked. I followed that program through to my career. After college, I worked in cancer genetics, which again was so eye-opening. It was very gratifying.

And you can imagine it was a little bit difficult for me to walk away from all of that and still feel like I was holding true to the purpose that I kind of set out for myself when I was 13. Well, what I realized is that even though I’m not within the healthcare field anymore, I can still use my influence, my knowledge, my skills for good to help families who are in that same situation.

I remember a few months before I left my job in cancer genetics, I had to make several runs to the local cancer center, the hospital there. And I walked in the lobby one day and there was a little card table set up. And there were a handful of hats that people had knit, crocheted. There were some loom knit hats. And I just looked at them and admired the person who took the time to make something for me—a complete stranger—to help brighten their day, to keep their head warm. It was in the winter during that time and I remember feeling so sad that that table only had about 10 hats on it and there was a waiting room of at least 20 patients in the other room.

And so I realized at that time that even if I am leaving the healthcare field, even if that’s not the impact I’m supposed to make, I can still make an impact in these people’s lives by using the resources that I have now to organize and to help people know how to give back to these people.

Now you might be asking me, well, Brittany, I don’t have a story. I can’t think of anything, any defining moment in my life that might help me to make this decision. Well, that’s okay. I think that there are going to be a lot of people in that position where they don’t have a story or they can’t think of one, and that’s 100% okay. You don’t have to have one.

So in those cases, what I would ask you to do is ask yourself a few questions. Well, the first question would be, what’s your soft spot? Is there any situation, any person, any idea, anything that just kind of melts your heart a little bit? It could be homeless people, babies or children, cancer patients, pets. If you kind of get an overwhelming sense of joy and want to help when you think about different situations, well, that’s probably a good indicator that that’s something you feel incredibly passionate about.

And I’m asking you to do this for one reason and one reason only. And that is to help guide your next step. So once we figure out why we want to do this, the next thing we need to do is find out who needs our help.

Well, the truth is there are tons and tons of people who need help. And there’s only so much of each one of us that we can give. So we need to find the right person to help.

We’re gonna go two directions with this. We’re gonna talk a little bit about how you can get involved on the local level and then how you can get involved on a larger scale with larger organizations.

Many of us want to keep it low key. We wanna get involved on a local level. Maybe we don’t wanna have to worry about shipping things. We just want to drop off the goods that we have created. Well, in that case, getting involved on a local level is gonna be the path that you wanna take.

The first thing I would recommend doing is, well, one, think about your reason and allow that to guide you to the person you’re going to contact. Some of the places you can reach out to just for guidance to figure out who is in need and how to submit things to them:

First would be to visit your local shelter or your local hospital. You can talk to somebody at the information desk there and they can get you in contact with the right person.

Another thing I would try, if either of those don’t work, then check with local churches or your church personally. You may already know of a group that is formed there. A lot of organizations who are in need of things will reach out to churches for help. And so those people usually know who is in need and what they need.

Now, if those three things don’t work, the next thing I would try is your local yarn shop or your local craft shop. Again, those are places that these organizations reach out to to get help, especially if there isn’t any media or press around their cause. They’ll reach out to the local yarn shop or the craft shops if they’re looking for yarn-related or craft-related donations.

Now, if you want to get involved on a larger scale, I’m going to focus a lot of my attention on this because there’s a lot of resources and a lot of information here. There are so many places that you can get involved with if you’re willing to ship your goods or if you really want to surround yourself by a really big cause.

I’m going to outline four different organizations that I have found to be extremely helpful. They make it super easy for you to just know exactly what to do, what to donate, how to donate it. They give you patterns and resources, and they’re just really, really great organizations.

The first of those four is Project Linus. Project Linus is an organization that has been around since about 1995 when the idea was born after one of the founders read an article in a magazine about a courageous little girl named Laura who found comfort from a security blanket through the time that she was going through intensive chemotherapy.

Well, I love Project Linus because their mission is to provide love, a sense of security. If you want to get involved with Project Linus, they have—I mean, it’s such a large organization. It’s broken into chapters. They have local chapters, which are basically state organizers to help us get involved and let us know exactly what they need at that time, because their needs sometimes change.

Well, this is the first place you should look if you want to get involved with them. So from their homepage, which I’ll link to in the show notes, you can access their Get Involved tab. And from there, it’s really simple. I’ll link to this page that I’m talking about in the show notes so you don’t have to hunt for it.

When you visit that page, you’re going to see a map of the U.S. and it’s responsive. So you just click on your state and when you do, you’ll be given a list of local chapters that you can contact and send your items to directly.

If there isn’t a chapter in your area or in your state, I encourage you to start one. I mean, this is a large organization. There are several chapters. I mean, there are tons of chapters. But if you live in the area where there isn’t one yet and you really want to get involved and do something incredible, you can apply for starting your own chapter in your own area. And I will link to that application as well in the show notes.

The next organization I want to talk about is Little Hats Big Hearts by the American Heart Association. Now, this organization started back in 2014 in Chicago, Illinois, and that first year they collected 300 hats, which is really incredible, right? It’s a great success story.

But what makes it even more great is that in only three years, they’ve expanded to 40 states. They donate thousands of hats. And so volunteers are joining from around the country in connection with the Children’s Heart Foundation to celebrate American Heart Month by knitting and crocheting tiny red hats for babies who are born in February.

You may have seen some of these hats on Instagram because I have. A lot of people are making these tiny hats. They’re snapping pictures of them and posting it on Instagram. They’re so cute. It’s so quick and easy to make. And February is right around the corner. So get your donations in as quickly as possible.

The great thing about Little Hats, Big Hearts is the message behind it. So this organization collects these hats and donates them to thousands of babies who were born in the month of February in order to empower moms to live heart-healthy lives and to help their children do the same.

Now, if you would like to get involved, you can, well, first figure out what yarn is in your stash or what yarn you want to buy. They’re looking for hats that are specifically in red, so think the American Heart Association red, that bright red, and you want to focus in on cottons or acrylics that are medium to heavy weight and that are machine washable and dryable. Again, this is a great stash busting project.

Now, don’t worry about trying to find a tiny hat pattern. They do have patterns available on their website that are completely free for you to use that have all of the requirements spelled out. They have them for, again, knit and crochet. So it doesn’t matter what you do. There’s a pattern waiting for you.

Tiny Hats, Big Hearts is set up in a very similar way that Project Linus is and that it’s organized by chapter, but the functionality of the website is a little bit different. When you go to the page that I’m going to link in the show notes, basically their homepage, you’ll see a dropdown menu for different state chapters. And you’ll just go through, you’ll find your state, you’ll find it broken down even more. If there are multiple cities within your state, you’ll find a selection for each one of those. So you’ll just choose the one that’s closest to you. And when you do, you’ll see the contact person and the address where you should ship your tiny hats to. It will basically be the hospital in that area who is collecting those hats.

The third organization I want to talk about is Caps for Good, and that’s from SaveTheChildren.org. This is an organization that collects caps to help newborns in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to keep warm. They have their knit and crochet stuff specific for us in a PDF booklet, which I found to be incredibly helpful. It tells you a lot more about their mission. It also gives you a free knit and crochet pattern, so it doesn’t matter what craft you enjoy, there’s a pattern for both. It tells you where to send the cap, and they even have a personalizable tag that you can print out, fill it out, and that’s going to be given to the mom with the hat that you donate. So she can read your story, read a little bit about you and why you did what you did.

I will also link to this specific PDF booklet in the show notes page so you can read all about that. But, you know, don’t forget that there are other ways that you can get involved with this organization. You can do that by going to savethechildren.org.

The fourth organization I want to talk about is Knots of Love. This is an amazing organization, and I feel a little bit like a broken record here. I feel like I’m saying that over and over, but these are all great causes, great organizations to get involved with.

Well, Knots of Love has collected and donated over 375,000 caps and blankets since 2007. That just blows my mind. That is so amazing. So, this is a wonderful cause to get involved with. And, like the others, they make it incredibly easy for us to donate those caps and NICU blankets.

Their website is set up in such a way that it gives you three steps that you need to do to get involved with this organization. You guys know how I love my steps and little check boxes.

The first thing you’ll find on this list is to check the approved yarn list. This is one of the few organizations that I have found that actually does have a requirement of specific yarns you can use for donation, but they do that for a good reason. They’re giving these donations to babies in the NICU, they’re giving it to chemo patients, and all of the yarns on this list, and there are several, don’t feel like you have to figure out five or six different yarns. I mean, there are dozens of them. So you’re sure to find something on your list that’s available in your area or that you might have in your stash. But just know the reasoning behind it. They’re doing it for a good reason. And these specific yarns have been cancer patient tested and approved.

So step two that they have on their website is to print the submission form and include it with your donation. Simple, easy to do. Just download it, fill it out, send it in.

And then of course, the third step is to mail it in. So three easy steps to get involved with Knots of Love. I will link to this page in the show notes.

And the other thing I want to mention about them is that they have free patterns. They actually have quite a few free patterns available for you to use, as well as sizing charts for you to use as reference. So because they collect caps and NICU blankets, you’ll find patterns for both of these. And I even saw a few that were translated into Spanish and Italian, which I thought was pretty cool.

Well, I couldn’t possibly end this episode without mentioning Warm Up America Foundation and Knitted Knockers. And both of these organizations really tug on my heartstrings. I’ve been involved with Warm Up America for three years now, organizing those challenges that donate blankets to various organizations in need. And Knitted Knockers gives me an opportunity to give back to survivors like my aunt.

Well, I have been in contact with the two amazing women behind each of these organizations, and both have agreed to be on the show. So you’ll get a full episode highlighting how and why you might want to get involved with these two organizations. And keep an eye out for these episodes this month.

Well, hopefully I have helped you to find your why. I’ve given you some resources to give back locally if that is the method that you prefer. And some larger organizations that are easier to get involved with online. We have Project Linus, Tiny Hats, Big Hearts, Caps for Good, and Knots of Love. And of course, Warm Up America and Knitted Knockers. We’re going to learn more about those in the next couple of episodes.

I realize there are tons of resources here within this episode. I was going through the outline and I’m copying and pasting so many links for you. Don’t feel like you have to memorize any of this. Just memorize one URL and that’s bhookedcrochet.com/session045. Just scroll down. Find the organization that you’re most interested in. You’ll find all the links you need to get involved.

I want to make this as easy as possible for you because if it’s easy to take that first step, I know more people are going to be willing and able to do it.

Also, if there is an organization that you want to add to this list that I didn’t discuss here on the podcast, please leave that in the comments section on the show notes page. I’d really love to use this page as a great resource for people who really want to get involved. And by compiling a large list of organizations, I know we can give back as much as we possibly can.

And if you have any questions whatsoever about what we covered here today, you can also leave that in the comments section on the show notes page. I will do my best to answer as many questions as I possibly can. And if you read a question that you know the answer to, feel free to chime in and help that person out.

Don’t forget to join me in my one book a month challenge for 2018 and use Audible to help you accomplish this goal so you can listen while driving, cooking, crocheting, and whatever else may hinder you from this goal. When you sign up for your free 30-day trial, you’ll get one free book download. And if you find out that Audible isn’t right for you, you can cancel that service at any time and that book is yours to keep.

You can sign up through behookedcrochet.com slash audible. That’ll get you your free 30-day trial. It’ll get you your first free book.

And once again, if you don’t decide to go through Audible, please still join me in this challenge. Reach out to me on Twitter. Tell me about it. I can’t wait to hold each other accountable and to crush this goal, to grow as a person, and to learn so much more because of it.

I’ll be back at you next Thursday with another episode that will inspire and motivate you to give back to the community and how you can get involved with the Warm Up America Foundation.

Cheers and have a wonderful week. Bye-bye.