COLLIER CITIZEN

Made with love: Southwest Florida kids use plastic bags to help the homeless

Over, under and over again: with thousands of plastic bags, determination, and a loom constructed out of PVC pipes, one group of children wove a way to keep the homeless from sleeping on the cold, hard ground.

Plastic bags, the ones that usually sit in the cupboard after the groceries are put away, were overflowing out of several black garbage bags – the children from the Big Cypress Elementary Odyssey of the Mind team and residents of Pelican Marsh gathered at the community center to weave two plastic mats for the local homeless.

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The community came together at Pelican Marsh Community Center to make plastic yarn or 'plarn' mats for the homeless in Southwest Florida.

For Oen Frost, 11; Samuel Roman, 11; Caliana Jeffries, 11; Molly Cope, 10 and Jackie Wentworth 10 along with coaches Kristi Oen and Justin Messier, using “plarn” or plastic yarn to weave sleeping mats, was the key to landing the group first place out of 15 countries and 50 states in the Angel Project section of the Odyssey of the Mind competition. Since the introduction Angel Project to the competition seven years ago, they are the first elementary school team to claim victory.

“There’s the environmental, community service, and the problem solving – it’s the creativity of taking those materials and solving a community problem, which is really what they were recognized for,” said Kristi Oen, not only coach, but mother to teammate Oen Frost.

They first stumbled upon a video of people making ‘plarn’ mats when combing the internet for inspiration to make an alien antenna. The untapped potential of plastic yarn begged to be explored, and so their Angel Project was born.  

“We saw that they were making mats for them to lay on. But no one was making them for homeless people, and we thought this would be a really good idea, and that it would also be a good idea for our Angel Project,” said Oen Frost, 11.

The competition took place on May 23 in Ames, Iowa where for three days, they ran a booth at the Creativity Festival and taught teams from around the globe how to make plarn mats for the homeless in their area. Eighteen mats were made and donated locally to Emergency Residence Project in Ames, and teams from Wisconsin to Hong Kong signed up to make mats in their area.

“People are doing it all over the world, helping –[we’ll keep doing this project] up to the point where we can’t make any more mats,” said Samuel Roman, 11.

Before taking the plarn mats to competition, they went through around eight or nine prototypes before they landed on the PVC loom and weave method. With a group of six trained individuals, each mat takes about an hour and a half to make; before, when they would crochet mats instead of weave them, one mat would take one person 14 hours to complete.

The Angel Project is a special project done during the school year where students are challenged to improve their community with the help of adults, related organizations and mentors. After deciding they would make plarn mats for their project, the team forged a connection with St. Matthews House, a local homeless shelter.

When Ronnie Sopena, a volunteer coordinator for St. Matthews House, heard their idea, he was immediately on board.

“In my world, there’s different things people can do to help the homeless. Some are more direct as far as the impact than others,” Sopena said. “This is as direct as it gets.”

As a group, the children and coaches received a tour of the shelter so they could see first-hand the breadth and depth of the homelessness in Collier County.

 “What we tried to do with the kids besides just giving to homeless people – we really wanted them to understand where it was coming from,” Oen said. “It’s a bigger problem than even I thought in the community. When we went to visit Ronnie, we were shocked.”

Sopena referenced what he calls the ‘invisible homeless;’ in a sprawling suburban area, the homeless are less seen but exist all the same. While homeless shelters like St. Matthews house are available, they cannot supply beds to all who need them because county ordinances limit the amount of beds a facility can hold.

There are 1,215 students in the Collier County school system registered as homeless and 653 homeless adults according to a Hunger and Homeless Coalition 2018 study.

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“The part that I love the most [about winning] is that it’s going to bring more awareness to homelessness. I mean I’d only every seen one homeless person in all of Collier County, but now to know that there are huge communities that are hiding and sleeping on dirt in little wooded area and stuff, it really just breaks your heart,” Oen said.

On each mat, the team leaves a little note which reads, "Made with love from the Odyssey Angels."

“So when we give it to them, it’s just a little something to let them know they aren’t alone,” Oen said.

Easterseals, a program that provides education and life skills to those with disabilities, makes one mat a month, and the children love making them. The Pelican Marsh community has decided to do at least one weaving event a month as well and bought their own PVC loom for only $25.

“It’s good for a lot of our residents. Some of them are older and they’ve lost spouses. They move down here and they haven’t really connected with anyone and they’ve lost a loved one,” said Lynn Albert, events director for Pelican Marsh. “It’s a way to bring people together and make new friends while helping other people.”

Even though the competition is over and they had their moment of glory on a world stage, winning is not what motivates the team – they want their project to spread outside their community and to the rest of the world.

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"You have a lot more than you think you have. You’re really not aware that there are so many people out there that don’t have homes, that aren’t with their families.  They just live on the streets, where we have nice houses and we get a lot of things that we want, they basically have nothing,” Frost said.

“It just brings awareness that everybody is not in as good a condition as you, and especially seeing them, that just makes you want to help more. It makes you want everybody to be as happy as you are.”

To learn learn how to get involved, contact Kristi Oen at 630-740-0312  or kristioen123@gmail.com. Or sign up to receive video and written instructions to make PVC looms and plarn mats: ody.kristioen.com