Kim Carpenter started collecting coats for the homeless over 30 years ago and since then, her annual Christmas drive has expanded to include everything from used blankets and comforters to tents and backpacks.
“This has been the biggest year ever for the donations,” Carpenter said in a phone interview with The Times Leader on Christmas Eve. “We still have one treatment room at the clinic that’s still half-full with blankets.”
This past weekend, Carpenter and her two children packed up a U-Haul with most of the donations and traveled to Philadelphia, where they distributed them to the homeless community there.
The rest will be distributed to the homeless population around the local area, including Kingston and Wilkes-Barre, and Carpenter said they will probably take another trip to Philadelphia in January.
“It’s so amazing and so many people are part of this process now with the donation efforts. It’s such a combined effort and I’m really grateful I get to do this, but it makes us cry because the need never stops no matter how good we of a job we do,” Carpenter said.
Her first experience donating to the homeless came during the Christmas season of 1993, when she and her husband were living in Philadelphia while she was attending graduate school at Temple University and he was working on-call at a local hospital.
That year was the first time they would be away from their families for the holidays.
So, instead of going ahead with their annual festivities, Carpenter’s parents decided to visit Philadelphia, where they got an up close look at the needs of the homeless population in the city.
With that in mind, they ended up spending Christmas morning collecting donations and handing them out to people in the area.
“It was just an amazing experience to give back and to be able to do it with my family. My mom just cried her eyes out,” Carpenter said.
Unfortunately, that holiday season was the last one she spent with her father, as he passed away the following year from pancreatic cancer.
As a tribute to him, Kim kept collecting every year and continued to do so when she moved back to the area in 2006.
Since opening her own clinic, Specialty Physical Therapy, located at the Midway Shopping Center in Wyoming, five years ago, following an unsatisfying experience working in corporate healthcare, Carpenter said the annual drive has become part of her clinic’s mission to give back to the community whenever possible.
“We do blood drives at the clinic. We do other collections throughout the year for like school supplies and pet supplies for Blue Chip. Anything we’re able to do, we do,” she said.
Since coat drives were abundant in the area, Carpenter eventually pivoted toward focusing other essential items like blankets, tarps and sleeping tents.
“We realized a big need over the last couple years where the homeless people had shopping carts, but they weren’t allowed to bring the shopping carts inside any of the shelters. They were losing their stuff overnight so we started collecting used luggage,” she explained.
Part of Carpenter’s goal is to give back personally.
“We literally go to the streets. We go to bridges and tent communities and walk through parks. I’ll drive past places like the soup kitchens or I’ll pass by shelters,” she said.
Although people are often concerned for her safety, and she admits she’s gone into some “seedy” places in the past, the response from the homeless community itself has been nothing but positive.
“They’re always saying God bless you and stuff like that. They’re always just the most kind and considerate. We’ve never had a problem,” said Carpenter.
Because she spends so much time connecting with people and listening to their stories, she’s always dismayed when others pass judgement on those who are homeless.
“People sometimes think they’re all drug addicts, but that’s not the case at all,” Carpenter said. “One thing we’ve learned over the years of doing this is all of us are about three paychecks away from being in the same situation, especially [in this] economic climate.”
After all these years, continuing the drive has become a testament to the heart of her father and her mother, who has since also passed away.
“It’s just who they were. They just gave every part of their being that was there to give in whatever way they could,” Carpenter said. “They definitely installed that in us and I really did everything I could to install that in my children.”
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