Helping Other Women focuses on furniture needs
A Youngstown organization channels its efforts into getting women, their children and their belongings off the floor.
YOUNGSTOWN — Eating dinner on the floor probably isn’t a necessity for most people.
However, a local organization realized that some homes have no table, or other furniture.
For 10 years Helping Other Women Inc., a local organization, has been helping women in need to get furniture and to become self-sufficient and active members of society, said group president Taunya Fuller.
“It’s been my heart’s desire since I was about 12 years old to help other women,” she said.
“At this time our biggest project is getting and giving furniture,” Fuller said.
The organization’s furniture program is called Operation Off the Floor. Conducting home visits allows the organization to determine what each woman needs and provides them with tables, chairs, couches, beds, plates, silverware and more.
On one visit, Fuller went to the home of a young mother with five children and another on the way.
“The five kids were coloring on the floor, and they were content with that,” said Fuller, who wasn’t OK with seeing children on the floor.
Providing that family with a table not only gave them a place to sit and eat as a family but a place to do homework and color, she said.
“We want to get people off the floor, clothes off the floor,” Fuller said. “We think everyone has a bed to lay in or couch to sit on, but they don’t.”
Operation Off the Floor helps create more normalcy and nourishment in the lives of women and their children, she said.
“By providing women with furniture, we are jump starting their new lives,” Fuller said.
Helping Other Women, in conjunction with the Youngstown Office on Minority Health, is hosting an event starting at 9 a.m. today celebrating Women’s History Month and emphasizing the health of a woman’s mind, body and spirit.
The event at Oakhill Renaissance Place, 345 Oak Hill Ave., will include numerous groups that offer services to women, as well as speakers on breast cancer, Fuller said. “We want to teach women how to properly care for themselves and to be mindful of others,” she said of the purpose for the event.
Featured speaker is Sonja Williams, wife of Mayor Jay Williams, who said she’ll be touching on the lives of some specific women and how they affected the community and world.
Williams said she will also touch on the need for women to know their goals and where they want those goals to lead them in life.
Williams is the outreach and intervention coordinator with Youngstown Early College and said Youngstown has some significant organizations, such as Helping Other Women and Beatitude House, that concentrate on strengthening the lives of women.
“They really empower women to go back out in the community and do,” she said.
These organizations provide the necessary assistance for women to get back on their feet, while teaching them to be contributors to society.
“[The women] have to take those resources given to them and turn around and do something positive,” Williams said.
To donate to Operation Off the Floor or for more information, call (330) 797-5055 or visit www.how.bigbig.com.