Worth Manifesto Launches Second Pittsburgh Campaign to Help Women and Children at Texas Border

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 

WORTH MANIFESTO LAUNCHES SECOND PITTSBURGH CAMPAIGN TO HELP WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT TEXAS BORDER

“Joy To the Border” Sets Goal to Collect Hygiene Items and Food for 1500 Immigrants-

Pittsburgh, PA, Nov. 26, 2019  — What can one person actually accomplish in addressing the issues of humanity at the Texas/Mexico border.  If you are Chilean born and now Pittsburgh native Sandra Villarroel, you can rally volunteers and collect 5,000 hygiene kits and deliver them to the thousands of migrants living in squalor conditions at the border, which she did this summer.

 If you aren’t satisfied with one campaign, then you launch another, even more ambitious campaign to help supply necessary items to women and children.  “Joy To the Border” launches this week and runs through December 31. Sandra is once again determined to bring kindness to the border with this new drive to collect donations of travel-sized toiletries and beauty products, individually wrapped snacks, school supplies for a children’s sidewalk school, yoga mats for people to sleep on, and handwritten notes of encouragement in Spanish. There are currently 18 collection points across Pittsburgh (click here for the list).  

Ms. Villarroel says, “This is not a political campaign, but an act of humanity. Regardless of where anyone stands on the issue of immigration, we are all still called on to be kind.”

In addition to the items, Sandra is hoping for financial contributions that allow her to fund the transportation of donations and dinners for the 1,500 people in the refugee camp. 

The donations will be delivered by a volunteer group of 15 professional photographers in January. With the images they document on the trip, Sandra is planning to create an exhibition to bring awareness and also to show the community the recipients of their generosity.  

Sandra is a wedding photographer, who left Chile at age 25 years old to follow an American Marine she met in her hometown. Today, Sandra’s life takes place next to her veteran husband, among brides, homeless people, and social change.  She launched Worth Manifesto this past July as a project that seeks to acknowledge the humanity of marginalized women, particularly those living in the street. For Pittsburgh’s homeless women, Worth Manifesto collects and gives women makeup bags with beauty and hygiene products, snacks, and handwritten personal notes of hope and encouragement. As a photographer, she began to take leftover food from weddings directly to the homeless.  She then learned that women lacked the proper hygiene items and started collecting and distributing donations. 

During the summer of 2019, Sandra had the desire of impacting marginalized women outside of Pittsburgh and launched her first drive to help women living at the refugee tent camp outside Brownsville, TX, border crossing where thousands of migrants are homeless. This first campaign aimed to bring 1,000 hygiene bags to the border, but surpassed five times that goal, bringing 5,000 bags. This operation was supported solely by the generosity of the community. She delivered the bags to south Texas herself, where she witnessed firsthand the humanitarian crisis taking place; a crisis that in her own words, “is affecting the most vulnerable of all: children and women.” 
For more information, visit www.worthmanifesto.com  or @worthmanifesto on all social media channels.

###

Contact:
Sandra Villarroel, worthmanifesto@gmail.com  or 412.444.5268
Lynn Rubenson, lynnrubenson@gmail.com or 858.922.9201

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *