Palladium volunteer Virginia Fox wants to make it perfectly clear from the beginning – she can’t sew.
“I didn’t know anything about that part of it. But I’m a doer. And I knew I had to do something. And I love to organize and market things.”
So when Virginia heard from friends that there was a need for masks at non-profits and other community organizations and there were people out there making masks who didn’t know where they should go she knew she could help.
“I started going from person to person,” Virginia said.
For her that meant working the phones with her friends from the One City Chorus, The St. Petersburg Women’s Club, The Palladium (she praised our House Manager Nancy Jones for her help and support) and the Unitarian Church on Mirror Lake. And within days, St. Pete Maskmakers was born.
She found seamstresses, she tracked down patterns for masks, and she located community organizations in desperate need of masks – like the Ronald McDonald House and the VA Hospital at Bay Pines, where they wear the homemade masks over the professional grade masks, and St. Vincent de Paul, which needed masks for the homeless, a very vulnerable population in this epidemic. Other groups were the Salvation Army and Celebration Outreach, an umbrella group that serve the needy in St. Petersburg.
And like any project there were obstacles to overcome.
“We realized you couldn’t get elastic. So we had to find alternatives.”
She found ways around that problem and a donor to provide lots of fabric and the St. Pete Maskmakers project took off. She and her husband, Cal, “my wing man,” formed the delivery crew going out in masks and gloves to the various sites.
“We hoped to deliver 100 masks,” she said. “And by the end of this week we’ll have delivered over 500.”
As April draws to a close, Virginia thinks the urgent need for masks may be met and folks will transition into other ways to address this crisis. No matter what happens now with St. Pete Maskmakers, I’m sure Virginia will be busy doing something!
Virginia Fox
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