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BIRMINGHAM — When Wylie E. Groves High School teacher Kara Mason assigned a passion project to her student congress course, students brainstormed how they could benefit their community through their project.
One group decided to dedicate their time to collecting hygiene products for seniors. When they first proposed their topic to the class, they made the goal of producing 40 care packages. They quickly exceeded this goal and created at least 360 care packages.
The project was inspired by sophomore group member Becca Burnstein’s late grandfather, Dr. Gary Burnstein.
“For me, it is so special because we get to do something for the clinic named after my late grandfather,” Burnstein said. “He was a doctor, and once a week he would go to a homeless shelter and he would give any service to anyone there who needed it for free. And he had to do it in a closet because there was nowhere else for him to do it. And he absolutely loved doing it.”
After his passing in 2003, the family honored him by opening the Dr. Gary Burnstein Community Health Clinic in Pontiac.
Burnstein was in a group with students Drew Dorfman, Talia Kamoo, Cameron Beem, Mia Racco and Hadley Kostello. These students began working on this project around November.
“We started our hygiene drive by running it at Birmingham Covington School and worked with their NJHS cabinet members, and it went great there, and we started at Groves (High School), and it went great there too,” Burnstein said.
After collecting items at the schools, they separated the items into categories and held a packing party where they filled 59 bags full of products.
While this drive was going on, the group supplemented their efforts with a fundraiser.
The group worked with Dignity Grows, a national organization that opened a Detroit branch. In partnership with the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit Women’s Philanthropy, Dignity Grows’ goal is to provide hygiene products to the community in a manner that honors dignity.
For the Dignity Grows fundraiser, every $10 makes a tote bag filled with a month’s supply of personal hygiene products and essential period items.
The students reached out to as many people as possible and ended up raising $3,705 on their GoFundMe within about two and a half weeks.
Burnstein and Dorfman said this is the first time they have worked on a community project to this scale where they were expected to make independent decisions within their small group.
“It has been really cool seeing something blow up on that extreme of the scale, because I feel like everybody tries to (give) back in little ways, and the fact that it’s gotten to such a big scale and it will reach so many people is just amazing,” Dorfman said.
