St. Philip students turn school project into real charity

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GREENVILLE – Thirty-nine babies at the Pediatric Well Clinic at St. Joseph Hospital were a little warmer this winter thanks to the hard work of two 6th grade students at St. Philip Elementary School.

Rebecca Tillinghast and Valerie Papineau are cousins, born only six days apart, and are in the same class at school. They worked together on an assignment for their religion class that quickly turned into a year-long project. Their teacher, Mary Sorice, asked students to create a pretend charitable organization and explain its mission, who it would benefit and detail the way in which it would be run.

The cousins decided they could do even more than that. They dreamed up an organization called “A Blanket a Day Keeps the Chill Away” that would provide handmade blankets to babies at the St. Joseph clinic. Then, they brought it to life.

They had the sewing experience needed – the girls attend sewing classes with Andrea Hagan, whose own charity was their inspiration. Every year Hagan commissions the students in her sewing classes to create unique items for a fashion show that benefits the ALS society. Her students also sew blankets for Hasbro Children’s Hospital. Inspired by their sewing teacher’s selflessness, Rebecca and Valerie put their own plan into action.

With the permission of the school’s principal, they placed coffee cans in each of the classrooms and asked students for donations toward their organization. Over about two months they raised $97.50 with the help of their school community, money that was used to buy fabric for the blankets. They spent weekends and afternoons after school sewing side-by-side at the Tillinghast kitchen table until all 39 blankets were completed.

Each blanket, they said, took about 15 minutes to sew. All that time spent sitting behind sewing machines proved worthwhile when the girls recently visited the clinic and were able to donate the blankets. They were surprised to find out that the blankets, like most of the donations the clinic receives, would be gone nearly as soon as they had arrived because the need is so great. “I thought that they would be there a while longer,” Papineau said.

Her cousin added that the clinic employees told them that the handmade blankets would be the first blankets that many of the clinic’s babies had received. “They told us that babies come in with old towels,” Tillinghast said.

Now that the blankets are made and delivered and the school year is nearly finished, the two cousins are looking forward to next year. They plan to start fundraising for more blankets as soon as school starts again, and they hope that maybe next year they can make twice as many.

They were the only students in the class who decided to make their pretend charitable organization into a reality, and looking back they are glad they took on the extra work. “It’s satisfying that you did something,” Papineau said.