Last fall, volunteers from Église évangélique Le Rocher began weaving mattress mats from recycled milk bags to give to the homeless.
The project was initiated by Thérèse Moffatt in the fall of 2023.
Ms. Moffatt created a network of distribution contacts and collecting plastic bags to create the mats. Sadly, Ms. Moffatt died of cancer at the very beginning of the project.
Lise Lamoureux, a newcomer to the Evangelical Church, immediately offered to take up the torch.
“People who are in difficulty come to me,” she explains. “I’ve already been hungry in my life, so I can understand.”
So Ms. Lamoureux took a project in the making and turned it into a reality. She took the raw materials collected by Ms. Moffatt and turned them into a carpet, made entirely of milk bags, to give homeless people a kind of mattress.
“My goal is to have made about twenty by September,” she says.
To date, Lamoureux and her team are making their tenth and eleventh rugs. Each mat is made from over 300 bags of milk, and takes some 15 hours to make.
With the help of Johanne Gratton, administrative secretary at the Hawkesbury Food Bank, and Robert Lefebvre, mayor of Hawkesbury, the mats have now been put into circulation.
Mr. Lefebvre, as president of the board for the Hawkesbury detachment of the provincial police, proposed a partnership with Sergeant Major Jocelyn Lessard. Lessard agreed to provide the constables with a mattress mat to offer to the homeless during their working hours.
“Who knows these people better than OPP officers?” said Mr. Lefebvre.
New mats can be made as more milk bags are collected. Milk bags can be taken to the Food Bank.
