CARLISLE, Pa. (WHTM) -- Kids at a summer camp in Carlisle are making handmade quilt squares, drawing their own stories or tales from their imagination. Once the squares are sewn together, those quilts will head to the nation's capital later this year.
The kids are making memorial blankets as part of a project started by a nonprofit in the Midstate. The project is in its second year but this is the first time kids got involved.
"They're massive art machines," Pat LaMarche, board member at the Charles Bruce Foundation, said. The Charles Bruce Foundation started the memorial blankets.
This project is different than the normal arts and crafts kids typically do at summer camp.
"This is an awesome opportunity to have the kids give back," Jeanna Som, executive director of the Summer Program for Youth (SPY), said.
Kids at the SPY camp are drawing their own quilt squares, guided by LaMarche. LaMarche said the squares will eventually be sewn into family-size blankets. She expects to get three blankets from the squares the kids make.
On December 21, the longest night of the year, the Charles Bruce Foundation will bring those blankets and hundreds more from across the country and lay them outside the U.S. Capitol Building to highlight homelessness.
"It's a night we remember not only people who live on the street, but people who die on the street," LaMarche said. "It's an epidemic in our country."
LaMarche and Som want the kids to understand the struggles other people face.
"One little girl was just telling me that she loves her blanket at home, and she really thinks it's sad that someone might not have a blanket at home," LaMarche said.
Som said one of SPY's values is community, and this project is the perfect way to instill that value in the kids.
"We explain that to them and gives them a feeling of purpose and importance that they're able and have something to contribute and hope that they take that with them for the rest of their lives," she said.
Camper Frankie DeRose knows struggle firsthand.
"I was in a bad situation in a foster home before," she said.
8-year-old DeRose used her quilt square to tell her personal story.
"I drew a house and a car...it's basically me getting dropped off [at a foster home]," she said of her drawing. "I had to go back to them to get watched for Easter and basically, while I was sleeping, I was crying because I didn't want to go back."
DeRose said she is in a new foster family now and things have gotten better. She hopes her story can help others.
"I can show people that everything can get better, but you just have to let yourself, let it happen," she said.
It is just one more story -- and one more message -- LaMarche said they are bringing to the capital.
"If they are in a bad situation, I hope they get the message," DeRose said.
LaMarche said she hopes people who see the blankets are moved to action.
"Aside from 'Oh my god, look how many homeless experiences there are out there,' the other message is, you can change it," she said.
After the blankets are displayed in DC this December, they will go back to the communities which made them and be distributed to families in need.
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