Thanks to All Who Donated to Cam Cares!
The library wants to thank everyone who donated to Cam Cares! With your generous support, we raised nearly 6,000 pairs of socks, underwear and other underclothes for local students.
Previously known as Drop Your Drawers, Cam Cares aimed to collect socks, underwear, bras and t-shirts for public schools in Campbell County this past November and December. The final tally came in a 5,986.
Donations came from individuals and groups alike. One group was The Book Club Girls, who came together to donate 275 items! The library caught up with one of its members, Lorraine Giglia, to discuss why they chose to give to Cam Cares.
Giglia has been in The Book Club Girls since 2010, when she retired from teaching. The monthly club has met regularly for around 20 years. In the past, Giglia has donated to the annual campaign with her family.
“Since I had just our family’s [donations] down, I said, ‘You know, we’re all about books, why don’t we do this?’ And they all thought it was a wonderful idea,” Giglia said of bringing the idea to her book club. “This is the second year we’ve contributed as a group.”
Pictured: The Book Club Girls at a recent outing to The Green Line.
The donations will help meet a crucial, but often overlooked, need: Family Resource Centers hand out 100 or more socks, underwear and other underclothes every month to children.
As a retired schoolteacher, Giglia said the campaign’s mission is important to her. Before the time of the interview, she had breakfast with her grandsons, who asked her why she collected underwear. Clean underwear, she said, is something that is taken for granted; not all children have reliable access to such items.
“I am very much an advocate. I taught in public schools for 34 years,” Giglia said. “I think that public education in the United States should be the best that there is. We should listen to the needs of the schools and the needs of the teachers, which reflect what our students need.”
Collecting these items for schools not only helps keep kids in the classroom, but it also allows centers to allocate funding to providing other valuable resources, which in turns supports both students and teachers.
“I know, as a teacher—and I was among the majority—we don’t go to school at 8 am and leave at 2:50 pm or whatever. It’s a very time consuming but good job,” Giglia said. “I think that—between libraries and anything we do to educate our students to make them not only citizens of our state and of our country, but of the world… We have to support public education. It was to be one of our number one priorities.”
Giglia says that there are 11 members of The Book Girls Club and all but one are from Campbell County. Donating was a group effort. Before dropping their donations off at the library, Giglia said they gathered for dinner at The Green Line in Fort Thomas.
“We carried them out and said, ‘Wow, collectively, this is a lot of underwear,'” Giglia recalled. “I think everyone felt good about it.”
Their next read? All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. Other books titles they’ve read include The Wedding People by Alison Espach, The Women by Kristin Hannah and Blood to Rubies by Deborah Hufford.
The library thanks all who donated to this year’s Cam Cares campaign, which will return again this coming November and December. Other organizations who donated include the Kiwanis Club of Campbell County, The Highlands Neighborhood of Arcadia and more.
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