Grocery store gift cards for the holidays seemed too impersonal to Sandy Jaworski.
Instead, the Highland resident went to a Giant grocery store, worked out a deal with the managers and loaded up on enough turkeys, potatoes, stuffing and pies to feed at least 50 Howard County families in need last Thanksgiving.
“The families were stunned. All the shopping had been done,” said Steve Girard, director of community impact and men?s ministries at Grace Community Church in Fulton, who nominated Jaworski for the recently awarded Volunteer of the Year award from the county?s Association of Community Services.
Jaworski brings this personal touch to all of her volunteer projects. For Christmas, she wrote personal notes of encouragement to include in the children?s gifts, he said.
“Instead of giving a Barbie doll, she wrote a personal note of hope,” he said.
Each week, Jaworski, a Grace Church member, spends hours in a newly built barn next to the church sorting and folding donated clothes. The clothes get boxed up and taken to area schools or other sites, such as apartment complexes, four times a year.
The project, which Jaworski started five years ago in her basement, has evolved into the Clothes Closet, a moveable clothes center where families can browse the well-organized stacks for their size and styles.
Jaworski works with school officials and outreach organizations to determine which families are in need of clothes, which are donated by church members.
Last winter, she organized a drive to provide coats and winter clothes to more than a dozen Burmese refugee families who came to Howard in the dead of winter with little more than flip-flops and thin shirts.
“There?s such an incredible need that you just don?t realize is out there,” she said recently as she folded and stacked clothes.
“You?re just trying to make someone?s life a little better.”
For Laurel Woods Elementary School, where nearly 40 percent of students received free and reduced price lunches last year, Jaworski has been a consistent and reliable supporter, said Nancy Gifford, a Title I teacher at Laurel Woods.
“I can just e-mail her and say, ?We have a family with four boys and here are their sizes,? and she will handpick [the clothes] and deliver them,” Gifford said.
Jaworski is also humble, preferring to stay in the background.
“She never wants any personal glory or attention,” Gifford said.
