The Cherokee County Homeless Veterans Program and its partners collected, sorted and delivered over 5,000 winter coats to VA, GA National Guard, several homeless veteran outreach programs in and around the area, local and regional nonprofits ahead of this week’s coming cold front and Christmas.

Cherokee County Homeless Veterans partnered with the GA Vet Pests, the veterans group that works for several Georgia pest control companies, starting in early fall, to collect new and gently used winter coats that could be provided to needy veterans, homeless veterans and community nonprofit organizations.

Today this all came together as 40 volunteers from veteran and local community members started unloading the 26-ft. U-Haul truck carrying the 5,000 winter coats. The goals were to sort them, package them to the orders we collected and get them out, all in the same day.

To some organizations this might have been too much to do, but to this group who have done this for the past eight years it is a challenge worth doing. The program started eight years ago when a young daughter of an Adopt a Veteran candidate told me that all she wanted for Christmas was a new winter coat and a copy of her class picture to give to her grandmother, stated Jim Lindenmayer, director of the Cherokee County Homeless Veterans Program and service officer for Canton, Ga., American Legion Post 45. How do you not make this happen?

We have been making this happen every year since then to provide winter coats to low-income veteran families, homeless veterans and others in need across Cherokee County and now into several other counties to include Cobb, Bartow, Pickens, Henry, Fulton and others. We are so thankful for the donated coats that we wanted to share them not just with the military community such as the GANG, VA Homeless program and several other veteran outreach programs, but with other programs like MUST Ministries, Destined 4 Greatness, Mary Hall Freedom, Lazarus House outreach, My Brother’s Keeper and a number of other local community nonprofit organizations.

Our timing could not have been better as the weather is expected to be in the low 20s by mid-Christmas week, and we hope that these winter items will bring some warmth to those who are less fortunate this year.

The Cherokee County Homeless Veterans Program is a subunit of Thomas M. Brady American Legion Post 45 and also part of Woodstock American Legion Post 316.