Birmingham students turn project into thousands of dollars of hygiene products for seniors
BIRMINGHAM, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - A group of Birmingham students are solving problems for seniors by providing thousands of dollars worth of hygiene products.
"We were a little bit worried about it. We have never really done a hygiene drive before or seen something like this before. We were a little worried about how it would work," said Groves High School sophomore Becca Burnstein.
When members of the Groves Student Congress say when they were assigned a project, they were asked to identify a problem in their community and find a way to fix it.
"For all of our passion projects, we had to do a formal proposal to all of our class," Becca said.
That proposal was donating hygiene products to seniors, an idea inspired by Becca's late grandfather, Gary Burnstein.
"He was a doctor and he would go to a homeless shelter once a week and give free services whenever he could," she said.
Ready to raise money, the Groves Student Congress connected with teacher and National Junior Honor Society co-chair Melissa Desimone about holding hygiene drives within the district.
"The Groves Student Congress reached out to us to see if we would be interested in collecting items and so I asked our NJHS cabinet members if they would like to help and they said they would," Desimone said.
Burnstein says a GoFundMe also helped raise more than $3,500.
And while that was certainly enough to reach their goal, sophomore Talia Kamoo says they reached out to Dignity Grows to help provide some products that are hard to get their hands on.
"A lot of what we were doing was like menstrual products and that is really important to me because period poverty is a big problem and that is something I really want to work towards," Talia said.
At a time where nearly everything feels more than what most used to pay for, Becca says she hopes their project can help put a smile on the face of seniors.
"We kind of realized that hygiene products are such simple things that we take for granted and that are so expensive now-a-days. That's where we came up with the idea of for the hygiene drives and to make them into full care packages for the patients at the clinic," she said.
She says more than 60 care packages will be donated to seniors at the Gary Burnstein Health Clinic in Pontiac, a place named after her grandfather, in the next couple of months.