With 800 plastic grocery bags, two months and some simple braiding, students are helping homeless people in the Indianapolis area get a better night’s sleep.
About 52 students at Franklin Community Middle School have made 25 hammocks this year through a club at their middle school. About 150 students have been involved in the project since it started.
The students spend about 45 minutes a day at school braiding plastic grocery bags and weaving them into hammocks. The finished hammocks are then delivered to a church in Indianapolis and distributed to homeless people in the area.
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The project started about two years ago when Melissa Tunis, an introduction to foreign language teacher, spoke with her mom who does the service project at her church in Nineveh.
Tunis recognized the project as a free community service her students could get involved in, she said.
“I wanted to give the students something they could do that had a positive impact on them and something that they could see the results of,” Tunis said.
Students began cutting the plastic bags into strips and crocheting them into mats that would be distributed to homeless people in the Indianapolis area.
People who received the mats were thrilled to get them. One man suggested Tunis look up hammock patterns. The hammocks are a way for people to get off the cold and wet ground, the man told Tunis.
She looked up the pattern and decided her students would switch to making hammocks for the homeless. Crocheting the mats was more difficult to teach than the pattern used to turn plastic bags into hammocks, Tunis said.
The students spend time during their school day, during an enrichment period, working on the hammocks. Donated plastic bags are cut into strips, braided into long ropes and then crocheted and tied together to make a hammock that can fit the weight of a grown man. Each hammock takes students about two months to make.
The project costs no money and is a way to show students that they do not need money to give back, Tunis said.
“I want them to know it doesn’t matter how old they are, they can improve someone’s life and it doesn’t cost to be kind,” she said.
About once a year, Tunis takes students to the church in Indianapolis where the hammocks are distributed to the homeless people who need them. Students also spend the day giving out food and other necessities as part of that church’s mission.
Most students have what they need day-to-day and seeing those who don’t is an eye-opening experience, said Kaelynn Matern, a seventh grader.
“You go through life thinking it is so easy and you have all of this stuff,” she said. “Then you meet people who don’t. It’s interesting.”
Middle school students do not typically have their own money and sometimes their time is limited. Helping with hammocks during the school day is an easier way to give back, Adriana Trimpe, a seventh grader, said.
“There are quite a bit of homeless people out there, this is one of the ways I can help,” she said.
