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A donation drive by the UTEP French Club will be spread thin this year as students try to contribute to different causes.
Last year, the French Club donated about $200 to the Lee and Beulah Moor Children’s Home.
“I’m not too sure if we’ll be able to do that this year, but at least we have a decent collection of winter clothes—jackets and coats,” said David Caraveo, senior pre-nursing major and member of the French Club.
Their current focus will be to collect coats and jackets—sizes fit for babies to teenagers—until Nov. 27, when they will take the last batch collected to the children’s home.
The home is not an orphanage, but more of a family-service agency that has expanded its services since the home opened in 1959. It runs on a trust fund started by the founders.
“You hear stories, where the parents try their best or you hear parents say, ‘I wish I would have done this,’” Caraveo said. “You do what you can, there’s nothing else to it. If you can learn something new to help, you give it a shot.”
Right now the home is at capacity with 60 children in its care—12 are in foster care and 47 are in general residence on the 13-acre campus, located on Cliff Drive.
The trust fund takes care of the day-to-day operations including utility bills. However, it does not take care of the food, the clothing or any other essentials for the kids.
The children’s home is a private non-profit and they don’t receive funds from the state or federal government. They also write grants to receive additional funding.
The French Club has placed two boxes in the Liberal Arts Building for donations. One is by the main entrance and the other is in the language and linguistics department, located on the first floor.
“Our life blood is donations, both in-kind and money. Everything that we have—the books in the library, the tables, the chairs—everything is donated,” said Paul Whittler, community relations development coordinator at the Lee and Beulah Moor Children’s Home. “If that dried up we would close in an instant because we wouldn’t be able to adequately take care of the kids like we do.”
Whittler said they accept anything from clothing and electronics to furniture and more.
“You name it, we take it and we can use it,” he said.
Families voluntarily place children ages 5-15, in the home for a variety of reasons.
“The economic disadvantage is just one case,” Whittler said. “We have grandparents, who are sole guardians of their grandkids, and they get to the point where they can no longer properly take care of them on a day-to-day basis.”
More information on the children’s home may be found at leemoor.org.
Kristopher Rivera may be reached at [email protected].
