We are Knit and Crochet 4 a Better World and our project focussed on expanding our hobbies of knitting and crocheting to donating finished, handmade garments to the transient community. This project began as we wanted to help the transients using our knit/crochet projects and also find more people with the same interest to help and learn new skills. When we discovered this grant system it was a great opportunity for us to not only reach our goals but connect with people from the community that were interested – it didn’t matter what level they were at, all were welcome and encouraged to discover new skills.
We have 18 new participants, and about 10 old participants. What we discovered was people loved to learn new skills and were all excited to try out new things. Many were also enthused with the idea of supporting the transient community in our area while exploring a hobby. We built engagement with community members as learning a new skill together while working to a common goal sets a healthy environment for bonding and interests in expanding one’s social circle.
There were many challenges we had to overcome during this process, for example : it was hard to find libraries and places that could consistently host our programs due to shortage of resources from the waves of Covid – we had to negotiate and constantly be on the lookout for openings and find ways to work around our differences which can be challenging, as many know, in stressful times.
If we have another chance at this project we would focus on providing a larger variety of patterns for the group to try out when creating garments for the transient community. Another aspect that we mentioned before with the difficulty of finding locations to host our program – we would attempt to give beginners a more frequent occurrence of lessons per month whether it be on zoom or other online or public areas.
Thank you to Richmond Care, Richmond Gives Society for allowing and supporting us during this project. We are extremely appreciative for the chance to engage with our community and be guided with a mentor from their organization as well.