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Date: 11/16/2020
HOLYOKE/WEST SPRINGFIELD – Kadyn McDonough from West Springfield has been working to give back to the Holyoke community since the summer.
McDonough, previously lived in Holyoke and has family that still lives in the city, said she began Hugs for Holyoke over the summer as a way to give back to children in need. Going into the school year, she worked to gather materials and collect donations from community members to create bags of school supplies for Holyoke students.
Now, as the holiday season approaches she’s finding a new way to give back to those in the community. McDonough said she knew she wanted to do something around the Thanksgiving holiday to help families, so she began saving.
“I wanted to do something for the holidays too, so I came up with the idea to raise money to help with families that might be going through a tough time for Thanksgiving,” she said. “I saved up $100 first, put it towards the fundraiser and then I started to talk to my family about it.”
She said after her mom said she would donate, she took to her Hugs for Holyoke Facebook page. She said she received a lot of feedback from the community and the donations started coming in. “I posted it, and then people started donating,” she said.
McDonugh said she accepted payments through Facebook, PayPal and Venmo. Eventually, enough people donated to her cause that she’d raised $845 to help more than one family in need during the holiday. In total, she said she believed she’d received enough donations to purchase “about five meals.”
In addition to the donations she received through the community, McDonough also said, “The Delaney House said they’d give me one free meal.”
However, in a later Facebook update she said the Delaney House had donated four meals and she had raised enough money to provide six meals.
She explained that people had been writing to her via the Hugs for Holyoke Facebook page to nominate members of the community to receive the holiday meal. “A lot of the nominations I received were from single moms, parents who had to work less hours due to remote learning and one nomination was for someone who lost their spouse to COVID,” she said.
She said names were picked on Nov. 13 at random to choose the families who would receive the meal. The meals, she said, would be picked up the day before Thanksgiving and dropped off to the families.