The Hawks Helping Hawks school needs closet provides necessities to students who may not have access to them. Donations are taken year-round at the counseling office. Any student who needs materials and support from the needs closet can reach out to any trusted adult within the school.
“[The closet] is called Hawks Helping Hawks because we want to be able to help our own,” counselor Stacy Lovett said. “We want our students to be able to see the value in helping provide for their fellow students.”
Hawks Helping Hawks provides necessities to students who may not have access to them. It has clothing, shoes, jackets, toiletries, food and school supplies that could be needed by students.
“We can help support a whole child — a whole individual from top to bottom,” Lovett said. “We have materials that can help whatever the need might be.”
Located in the library, the closet is set up to mimic a store. All items are hung up on racks or placed in shelves or baskets. The room contains a mirror, rug and seating poufs. Assistant principal Dr. Vanessa Zavar said she wants it to feel like the student is walking into somewhere nice.
“The thing that was always the most important for me was that it’s never donations as far as used clothes, that’s fine and that has its place, but not [for] this closet,” Zavar said. “In this closet, everything is brand new. It is meant to give [students] what [they] need and to make [them] feel good. I want [them] to be able to pull the tag off.”
The Untitled Social Project plans to help the needs closet grow into something bigger. Co-founder Simran Makhani said the main goal of the club is to address issues within the school that students feel need to be resolved.
“We’ve been looking around for different issues in the school that still need to be resolved and [the needs closet] was one of them,” Makhani said. “Someone that really needs anything from the closet [will] actually have a variety of things [to choose from].”
The closet was started before the school’s 20-year refresh in 2019, and was one of the only rooms left basically unchanged. Though the closet has grown since then, Lovett said she hopes to expand it even further to help out even more students. All information about students utilizing the needs closet will remain confidential.
“Donations are taken all of the time, and donations are always needed,” Lovett said. “There’s never a stop of needing materials. We’re going to help whoever needs something.”
