Kamloops students organize successful Socktober

Oct 18, 2018 | 5:30 AM

KAMLOOPS — Local students are gathering kind thoughts, and warm socks for Socktober.

The event stems from a YouTube video that Jennifer Jones, a Grade 3 teacher at Marion Schilling Elemntary School in Valleyview, showed to her students.

The video highlights the Socktober campaign, which encourages participants to collect socks during the month of October for the local homeless community.

Jones says her students were inspired by the video and wanted to organize their own donations.

“You know, I said ‘Well what are you going to bring socks in for? I don’t know who is organizing it.’, and they said, ‘Well we’re going to organize it!’, and I said, ‘You are? How are you going to do that?’, and they developed a plan and just started executing it. It was really them that kind of took the lead on it.”

The students threw their own twist on the project, Jones says, including kind “bucket filling” notes with the socks.

“All the students coordinated an assembly line here, and they put notes inside of each one of the pairs of socks,” Jones says. “They’re really sweet notes. They say things like, ‘We hope you keep warm this winter, we’re thinking of you’, things like that.”

Student Marley Storey says they wanted to help out because winter is on the way.

 “It’s getting really cold, so we decided to collect socks, mittens, and other things for the homeless people to stay warm during the winter.”

ASK Wellness Kamloops Director of Housing Supports, Kim Galloway was on hand to pick up the donations, which blew past the original goal of 50 items, with 300 pairs of socks collected. 

“Kim’s really good too,” Jones says, “She’s connected with of a lot of agencies in town, so we know that they’re going to go to those most in need.”

And that’s not all, she adds, the campaign has now spread to Lloyd George Elementary, where students got their own Socktober started with the Out of the Cold organization downtown. 

“So when my kids heard about that, they kind of went, ‘Oh, maybe we inspired somebody else’, and they kind of liked how it formed a bit of a chain.”