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For the past 23 years, volunteers from Park Ridge and beyond have been coming together to make warm blankets for homeless Chicagoans.

Blanket of Dreams was the brainchild of Teri Collins, former Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation executive director and Maine Township High School Dist. 207 Board of Education member. It started out as a volunteer activity for a women’s club at her parish, Mary, Seat of Wisdom, and grew into an annual event that attracts participants from all over Park Ridge and beyond. Even the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t stop it.

In recent years, donated blankets have gone to Franciscan Outreach, a homeless services organization on Chicago’s West Side. 

This year, Blanket of Dreams will be held on Saturday, Nov. 22, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. As usual, it will be held at Mary, Seat of Wisdom Clark Ministry Center, 1335 S. Clifton Ave. Collins said that volunteers can come in for as long as they like, and there will be free food and refreshments.

Collins recalled that, when she first pitched spending a day making blankets for the homeless, she didn’t think much of it.

“I was the vice president of the women’s club, and it was my job to come up with the project, like a project for a day, a project for members to do that year, a service project,” she said. “And I came up with that project, and there were other places around the country where they were making things.”

Since Collins liked to sew, she suggested  a “sewing machine marathon.” And while she said that “nobody thought that was a good idea” they tried it out. While they liked it enough to do it again next year, the group agreed that they’d have to make blankets some other way. 

“We realized, even doing it next year — very few people were still sewing,” Collins said. “We couldn’t get any kids involved because hardly anyone was sewing.”

Instead, they decided to make “tie blankets.” Volunteers take two pieces of fleece fabric, cut one-inch strips along the edges and tie those strips together, creating warm, soft, two-sided blankets.

“And just by doing it, we had just this incredible amount of people who participated,” Collins said. “We had all the Girl Scouts troops, and we had women who came in and did it, and at that point, it was still very much kind of a women’s project, which has changed quite a bit [since the first year].”

The group originally picked a different charity every year. The first year, they donated to Heartland Alliance immigrants service agency. The second year, they donated to Deborah’s Place, a women’s shelter in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood, But over time, they started to wonder how much difference they were making. 

“I think the thing that hit me, we gave it to a women’s shelter and some to a men’s shelter, but it was 20 here and 20 there,” Collins said. “When we discovered Franciscan Outreach, at the time, they were dealing with over 200 homeless people a day, and it was like, ‘Wow, they really have a need.’”

Franciscan Outreach was started in 1963 by Fr. Phillip Marquard, a Franciscan friar. He started out by providing a halfway house on the West Side of Chicago for people who served their time in person but didn’t have anywhere to go. The organization has since expanded its services, opening three overnight shelters and offering supportive services by themselves and in collaboration with other West Side service providers.

“There were several other charities that were just as worthy, and really good charities,” Collins said. “[But] we thought we would stick with Franciscan Outreach because they have such a high demand.”

One year, she recalled, she was buying tickets for the White Sox game on a cold March day, and saw a man wrapping himself in one of Blanket of Dreams’ fleece blankets.

“So then I was like, oh my God, that was so much beyond us, beyond me,” Collins said.

Blanket makers proudly drop-off their creations for others during Saturday’s annual event, adjusted for COVID-19 restrictions, at Mary, Seat of Wisdom, in Park Ridge. (Photo courtesy Blanket of Dreams)

The participation varies a great deal year to year, and while Collins said she’s always nervous that there wouldn’t be enough people, she said that was never a problem. Even during the pandemic, when social distancing requirements made gatherings impossible, people made blankets at home and brought them to the church. As time went on, they started getting more people from outside Park Ridge, and it’s definitely no longer just a “women’s project.”

“We have families, we’ve had a lot of dads coming, we’ve had teenage boys come to make blankets for service projects,” Collins said.

Blanket of Dreams is free to all participants, but organizers always ask people to bring extra fleece for those who can’t afford to buy it on their own. Collins said that there have been times it looked like they would run out of fleece — “and, sure enough, someone would walk through the door with four bags of fleece.”

“It’s…like the Bible parable of the loaves and fishes,” she said. 

One concern she heard, Collins said, was that the Joann Fabrics stores closing earlier this year would mean they wouldn’t have fleece. She said that there are other sources, mentioning chain stores such as Hobby Hobby and Michael’s, and local businesses such as Vogue Fabrics store in Evanston.

To Collins, Blanket of Dreams is as much about doing good as it is about bringing people who might not otherwise meet each other together.

“To me, projects like these are so important in times like ours, in times like ours where people are so divided and there’s so much chaos going on and so many things happening in the world that just border on atrocious,” she said. “To me, these are things that remind you who we are as human beings, and how we can come together and how we can do something good and not have all those other barriers.”

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