When Angela DeBose saw the homeless man slumped on the sidewalk and asking for change on a cold December day in 2016, she pictured her younger sister, who had left home and was lost somewhere on the streets of Colombia, addicted to drugs.
The image seared her heart. “I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do anything for my sister, but I can do something for the homeless community here in Memphis,” said Angela, who works in the customer care residential center for Memphis Light, Gas and Water in Tennessee.
As soon as she got off work that day, she found Memphis Union Mission, the city’s oldest and largest rescue mission. She asked what items were most needed. “Hats and gloves,” mission personnel responded. Angela thought for a moment and suggested, “Why don’t we do hoodies?”
That’s how Hoodies for the Homeless was born. Angela’s husband, James, also works at MLGW, in data security, and with the company’s blessing, both invited co-workers to help. Word spread, and in less than three weeks, the couple had collected 150 hoodies.
James had also asked Angela what she wanted for Christmas that year. She’d told him, “Money.” “She took the money that I was going to give her for Christmas and bought hoodies with it,” he said.
Since then, it’s become their tradition to start collecting hoodies and donations in the middle of November—and the effort has grown companywide. The DeBoses’ Christmas morning tradition is different now, too: Along with James III, the family drops off boxes of hoodies at Memphis Union Mission. “They know that white truck coming on Christmas Day,” said Angela. “And the smiles on their faces is priceless. It makes my Christmas.”
For James, whose wife once gave a homeless man enough money to live for three days, there’s the heart to do something even bigger, which includes incorporating as a nonprofit. For Angela, the people she meets through this work continue to inspire her: “What we’ve learned from them is that some people judge them and think they’re lazy, but there are people like you and I—professional people—who lose track in life because they fall into the trap of drugs or alcohol or depression and end up on the streets. They need a lot of support.”