Featured image: The Salt Lake City Women’s Shelter has supported unhoused women and their children since 1972. (Photo from their web page.)

My now 14-year-old granddaughter Aliya and her same-age friends Anna and Ellie volunteered for a community service project at their school, Salt Lake Arts Academy. Their goal is to collect clothes for Salt Lake City Women’s Shelter. I am so happy that Aliya asked me to write about their clothing drive on my website. In this time when dementia reduces my sense of self from one hour to the next, I will presumptuously boost my ego with the thought that she’d asked her Ouma’s help because she remembers the times when she and her brother Kanye, both Gen Zs (born circa 1996-2012), accompanied me to protest-rallies or awareness raising activities. For example, Kanye went with me to the Martin Luther King Jr address and march one year; once Aliya had reached Kindergarten, both siblings joined me in attending the 2015 gathering in City Creek park to protest the LDS church’s exclusion of the 8-year-old children of their gay church members from baptism, a much anticipated occasion that every other 8-year-old in their Sunday school class would prepare for the whole year before. (Four years later, the church repealed the ban.) In those days, Kanye, Aliya, and I would make placards ahead of time and join the event on the appointed day. Sadly, when my youngest grandchild, Dante (now 12), became old enough to participate in community activism, my memory loss, will-o’-the-wisp focus, and inability to drive or ride the bus prevented me from getting get both myself and a child to any event, never mind something involving a crowd where one could easily lose a pre-schooler.

Jokes aside, I am of course not taking credit for Aliya’s step into the part of activism that’s harder than participating in the excitement of a rally or march. It is their school that is providing the framework for starting them off in an activity outside of their own families’ community work. To actually make a difference in a cause you support, you must of course actually do something in practical real life—which is what “my” Gen Z girls” have taken on for their project: to collect clothing for the oldest women-with-children shelter in Utah, established by the Salt Lake Rescue Mission in 1974. Above, Utah’s Governor and other members of the Governor’s Office serve a Thanksgiving meal at the Women’s Shelter, 1921.

My Gen Zs’ project flyer

What the fine print says:

STUFF WE NEED: UNDERWEAR (SIZE MEDIUM-3XL) BRAS AND ANY OTHER WOMEN’S CLOTHES.

DROP OFF AT SALT LAKE ARTS ACADEMY, 844 S 200 E, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84111 FROM NOW UNTIL MAY 20^TH

The Women’s Shelter provides a place where women and women with children can find safety from abusive relationships, counseling for addiction, clothing, hygiene products, work therapy, life skills training, and spiritual growth. The Women’s Shelter is part of the Rescue Mission, which is run with private funds only: they don’t accept  state or federal funds since they see their Christian mission as integral to helping people-who-have-lost-their-community regain a healthy sense of self. For a decade-and-a-half, the Mission served men, women, and children on the same premises. By 1984, however, the Rescue Mission added a separate center to better fulfill the needs of women with children, now known as the Women’s Shelter. Their website tells success stories of women who successfully found their new direction in life as a result of their stay in this haven.

Rebecca Collier tells her story on the shelter’s website. Before her “downhill slide,” she had a good job as a restaurant manager and lived with one of her sons in a house that they had purchased together. Some of her other 6 children lived with them too. In 2021, the death of her father set off a serious bout of depression and despair. Rebecca self-medicated with drugs like ADHD pills and muscle relaxants. Soon she lost her job and one night decided to end her life. Paramedics resuscitated her. During an intervention, her family asked her to leave the house. Living between her car and a storage unit, she started taking street drugs. For 3 years she lived “in valleys of sadness and addiction.” After 3 stints in jail, she was in a very bad place. She was emaciated, it was winter. She found shelter from the snow in a library, from where she was able to call the Women’s Shelter. “My life changed. I am sober now and have a full-time job working at a nice restaurant at the Salt Lake City airport.” She finds comfort and support in her faith and “great home church. I am working to pay off my debts so I can start saving and get back into housing. I have restored relationships with four of my children. I have one going to a university, another about to start college, and a third in graduate school in North Carolina. My younger children are also well taken care of by family members.”

Aliya, Anna, and Ellie hold up their flyer in front of the 2023 student mural at their school, Salt Lake Arts Academy

For those of you who live in Salt Lake City, please support my Gen Z‘s project by donating whatever on the list you can lay your hands on. For those of you who live in the wider world, please think of contributing what you can to whatever shelter or organization in your community is important to you. We know that women and children are not the only ones who need our help—all kinds of shelters and food banks are constantly in need of donations. A situation that chafes my heart is that so many people suffer both dementia and homelessness. Most of us do not need a systematic review of “the associations between homelessness…and dementia” to figure out that “cognitive impairment and mental illness…are salient, proximal constructs that interact with homelessness.” Our society’s response to people in difficult circumstance—other than those who believe everyone has to pul themselves up by their on bootstraps belief—is so often “of course they need care, but just not in my neighborhood.”

Photo: Salt Lake Tribune. Homeless woman on a sidewalk leading to Sugarhouse Park, a few minute’s walk from our flat in Sugarhouse.

If you are able to help in any way, you might want to rope in YOUR Gen Zs (circa 1996-2012) as well as any other cohort of the generational alphabet in your purview. If you are a Boomer and about my age (74), your Gen Zs—like mine—are probably your grandkids; I won’t guess who your Millennials are—for me, they’re my godchildren (1980 to 1955); the Xs—for me, my children; and the Boomers—myself and Peter, siblings, and friends (1946 t0 1964). And if they are old enough to help, don’t forget the most recently named generation: now that the letters of the Latin alphabet have run out, the latest cohort (those born or still will be born circa 2013-2028) are named from the Greek alphabet—you guessed it: the Alphas. They have as much enthusiasm as energy!

Above, left, attending a “Close Guantanamo” rally with my godchildren Wilhelmina and Oscar—sadly, nationwide rallies and even the attempts of some powers-that-be—have still not resolved the situation; Right, a “No more guns” rally with Kanye and Aliya

As for this Boomer, I’m off to konmari my closet…

STUFF WE NEED: UNDERWEAR (SIZE MEDIUM-3XL) BRAS AND ANY OTHER WOMEN’S CLOTHES.

DROP OFF AT SALT LAKE ARTS ACADEMY, 844 S 200 E, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84111 FROM NOW UNTIL MAY 20^TH