We know you might mean well, but please: The homeless don’t need secondhand wedding gowns or dinged-up dress shoes or used mattresses or other stuff that a thrift store wouldn’t take. Nonetheless, folks have been bestowing Springfield’s makeshift tent city on Madison Street with trash unfit for castaways on a three-hour tour, emptying car trunks with stained shirts and ripped pants and other things that end up in garbage bins that the city hauls away, as if tent city were a free-for-all fly dumping zone. The city and those who want to help the homeless say no mas: Don’t bring stuff uninvited to tent city. While donations are welcome, call or text Helping the Homeless at 217-652-1307 before dropping off unwanted waterbeds and the like. Homeless people don’t want stained blankets and bedsheets any more than you do.
This article appears in High-stakes rematch.
