11/20/2025
It is Give to the Max!! This year, the Health Commons is asking for your help to purchase new underwear for our guests. This need has continued to grow. Providing underwear restores dignity, boosts confidence, and offers an extra layer of warmth and protection against infections. https://engagement.augsburg.edu/g/auggies-give-to-the-max-2025
Here is a story from one of our guests, who shared it with a social work intern for the Give to the Max event, and who gave us permission to share it with you.
Here is what our student wrote:
No one in our community should have to go without a clean pair of underwear, yet so many do. At the Augsburg Central Health Commons, this need has increased beyond what we can supply. We are focused on raising funds to provide underwear to our guests, and we need your help.
This need shows up in the lives of our guests every day, including one woman who utilizes Central Lutheran regularly. Her story is the reality of what most of our guests and community members experience. She became unhoused due to domestic violence and currently lives in a shelter. Even with a safe place, her days are spent in motion, constantly traveling just to gather her basic necessities.
“Traveling is part of the journey of being homeless,” she told me. “Resources are scattered all around, so we have to travel in order to survive." She is grateful that the Restoration Center at Central Lutheran Church, which includes the Health Commons, has multiple resources available because every need met here is one less exhausting trip.
When we don’t have underwear available, it means she and others must travel more just to get a clean pair. The mental and emotional strain of needing to search for underwear is incredibly difficult. Not to mention the increased health risk it puts our guests in, which could be easily prevented. “It’s really dehumanizing having to walk far then ask for something so simple only to be denied because there is none.”
Having access to clean underwear may seem small, but for her and many others, it means something much deeper. It means having one less worry, one less need to scramble for, one less health risk, and having a small piece of stability in a world that offers so little.
Your donation can give that dignity, comfort, and relief to people who are doing everything they can to survive.
We hope you consider donating. From, Sam
