DAR donates one million masks in one year’s time

In just under a year, members of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), donated more than a million handmade face masks, and gathered personal protective equipment (PPE) for essential workers and others in need, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The grassroots service project, Service to America from Home, surpassed a million items donated, just before the one-year anniversary of the launch of the initiative March 21, 2020.

“It’s all part of a proud tradition of service that dates to our 1890 founding, and I am so proud of our members,” said Denise Doring VanBuren, DAR president general. “In diffi cult times like these, I like to remember that it is not the emergency that defines us, but how we respond to it.”

Nationwide, more than 1,400 DAR chapters from all 50 states and five overseas, have participated in the organization’s service initiative. DAR members across the nation, answered the call to start sewing, swapped patterns, and got out their sewing machines and fabric stashes. Many people – adults and children alike – learned to sew, in order to make masks and PPE for essential workers, and those who needed it.

Through the initiative, masks were made for healthcare workers, police officers, emergency medical workers, migrant children and their families, military service members, nursing home workers, state veterans’ homes and Native American communities.

While many DAR members donated masks in their local communities, a massive “match-up” between sewers and mask requests, was also done through a set of databases that were rapidly assembled within days of the initiative’s launch. That system has fielded and fulfilled requests from hundreds of community organizations.

By May 2020, DAR members had already made and distributed 300,000 masks. Just recently, DAR accepted a request for 5,000 masks from a school district in Maryland, that needs them for low-income children returning to classrooms.