OUR PROGRAM
Clothe Me Initiative: Clothing, Care, and Dignity
Providing clothing and practical support to mothers, children, and families facing hardship.
Clothing is an everyday need, but it becomes hard to afford when families are already struggling to pay for food, healthcare, and other essentials.
Through the Clothe Me Initiative, HH Healing Hearts Inc. helps pregnant mothers and struggling families provide adequate clothing for their children. We reach families in two ways: personal home visits and community outreach.
How It Started
Since 2022, HH Healing Hearts volunteers in Ghana have visited the homes of pregnant mothers and struggling families. They bring food, give financial support, buy medicine, and check on how each family is doing.
Clothing soon became part of that care. Many of the mothers were raising three to six children and could not afford to clothe them properly. Our founder began collecting gently used clothing in the United States and shipping it to Ghana, where volunteers sorted it by size and delivered it during their visits.
Between 2022 and 2023, these home visits provided clothing to 25 children and 8 mothers. During those early years, our founder personally funded all of this work, from the clothing shipments to the volunteers’ budgets for food, medicine, and direct support.
In 2024, we formalized our clothing support as the Clothe Me Initiative. This allowed us to reach more families through community outreach, including our August 2024 event in Kpila. Our home visits continue today, and clothing remains one of the ways we care for families during those visits.
Clothe Me Community Outreach in Kpila
On August 24, 2024, HH Healing Hearts Inc. and our partner club, Agbada Aid, held a Clothe Me outreach in Kpila, a farming community in the Wa West District of Ghana’s Upper West Region.
We chose Kpila after an initial community assessment identified many children without adequate clothing, including children whose clothes were worn out or in poor condition.
More than 600 community members took part, including children, teenagers, parents, and elders. The day combined clothing distribution, caregiver education, and community discussion about keeping children healthy through seasonal weather changes.
What Happened on the Day
Our Director of Operations, Leenat Abdul-Rahman, opened the event. She explained the purpose of Clothe Me, how HH Healing Hearts Inc. works, and why Kpila was chosen. She encouraged parents, caregivers, and community leaders to keep protecting children from harsh weather, and she made clear that Clothe Me is meant to support the care families already give, not replace it.
Jinsung Rashida, a health promotion officer with the Ghana Health Service who volunteered with us, explained how hot, wet, and cold weather affects young children. She also shared how to prevent illnesses that increase during the rainy season, such as malaria and the anemia that often follows it.
Before the event, we sorted the clothing by size and prepacked some bundles for specific age groups. The rest was laid out in the center of the durbar, the traditional community gathering. Caregivers from the identified vulnerable households were invited forward to choose at least four pieces per child, including both tops and bottoms.
Volunteers also dressed children in the new clothes to show which outfits work best for rainy days, hot days, and the cool harmattan season.
Results
- Children in vulnerable households received clothing suited to both the rainy and dry seasons.
- Caregivers learned practical ways to protect children from weather-related illness.
- Families told us the clothing eased financial pressure, allowing them to put their limited money toward food and school costs.
A special thank-you to Ahmed S G Kamal, founder of Agbada Aid, and to his club at Winston Churchill High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, for donating most of the clothing for the Kpila outreach.
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