Community CARES, located on West Penn St., is a non-profit organization aimed at “[s]erving and strengthening the community by providing emergency shelter, resources and supportive services to individuals and families experiencing homelessness,” according to the Carlisle Area Chamber of Commerce website. 

In an effort to collect over 40 items that the organization classifies as urgent and ongoing, John Adeniran ’19 set up a box in the lower level of the HUB by the straircase for donations to Carlisle CARES. According to Adeniran, Carlisle CARES posts a list containing the most urgent needs for the people they are serving on their website.    

As a student, Adeniran believes that we have a duty to engage with the greater Carlisle community. “When we accepted the invitation to be students at Dickinson, we then became engrafted into the Carlisle community, de jure…it is up to us individually to make that engrafting a de facto reality. I would really love if we could make this an ongoing thing,” he wrote in an email. 

While Adeniran notes that the government–local, state and federal–also need to make steps towards preventing homelessness, he emphasizes the importance of our immediate influence as residents in the community. “If each person decided to pick one item, we could easily get everything checked off before Spring Break…Let’s play our parts in this restoration work,” he wrote.