Project Purse, a charity drive to collect purses and fill them with winter wear and toiletries for homeless women, brought in more than 400 holiday care packages at drop-off locations around Ottawa.
“We lost count at the end because we were really tired,” said organizer Tanya O’Connor, describing how donations poured in ahead of the Nov. 21 deadline. O’Connor spearheaded the campaign to collect the purses from local donors then fill them with a variety of items, from gloves and hats to deodorant and tampons. All in order to benefit Ottawa’s homeless women.
“I had amazing, beautiful life stories from women who had been on the streets and offered to do anything possible to help us,” O’Connor said. “One woman brought in 30 hats because she had been on the street.”
O’Connor has been helping the homeless in her area for the past few years, starting out by handing hats and mitts to people on the streets. “The only reason I did this as big as I did was because I’m capable of it,” she said, “I used to run programs for the City of Ottawa.” O’Connor added that she was able to dedicate her time and energy to Project Purse since she is currently in-between jobs.
O’Connor is well known for her charitable work by the people of Centretown. “She’s a real community worker, no doubt about that,” says James Dumont, president of Saralex Enterprise Ltd., the Centretown based company that served as one of the drop-off locations for the purses.
“She’s been a long, long time customer,” he said, explaining that the company’s White Cross Dispensary on 264 Elgin St. is a central location for Centretown residents. “The people in the downtown core are actually amazing in terms of community help,” Dumont said, adding that the pharmacy collected “between 50 to 70” purses.
Outreach is something that O’Connor has been doing for years, and she credits her son for inspiring a lot of her work. “He’s one of those kids that loves the world and cares for everyone, and he was the one that said ‘Mom we’ve got to do something for the guys on the streets,’” she says. “That was probably around four or five years ago.”
Due to her active involvement in the homeless community, her friends naturally thought of her when a similar purse project appeared online. The “Women Helping Women – Purse Project,” another Ottawa based donation drive, and several other community groups are collecting bags this holiday season. “A whole bunch of people tagged me in with ‘Why don’t you do this?’” O’Connor said. After posting it on her Facebook page she saw the idea grow: “It’s amazing how viral it went, within I think in a week and a half we went from having 17 people to 350.”
“I’m so heartened by what the community has done and how many people stepped up,” she says, adding that the huge reaction to the purses has made the work worthwhile. “We heard a woman, at the top of her lungs, ‘Woo-hoo’ because she got a purse,” O’Connor says. “It was the neatest thing, and I will have that in my brain for the rest of my life – that ‘Woo-hoo.’”
Micah Garten, development officer at Shepherds of Good Hope on Murray Street in the Byward Market, received purses from the project to distribute among visitors to the agency’s shelter and food services. “You know we love it when people from the community come together,” he says. “If you could see my office, which is overflowing with purses right now, you know this not a small undertaking.” Garten explained that projects like this one really help the women at the shelter. “It makes them feel special and makes them know that people really care about them,” he said.
November may have seen the end of this donation drive, but for O’Connor the desire to help others never fades. She is currently in the planning process for Project Winter Warmth, another social media inspired undertaking. This project will see telephone, hydro, or light poles in the downtown area get dressed in winter coats. The idea is to leave a hanging coat on a pole for someone who may need it.