Thread of altruism connects Long Islanders making masks during pandemic

In June, after making and giving away 1,500 masks, including 600 to Mount Sinai South Nassau, the Oceanside-headquartered hospital, Bonnie Sollog stopped keeping count on a spreadsheet. Yet, the Lynbrook resident has continued churning out masks — even though she returned to her office six months ago at the Nassau County Department of Health.

While largely spending her weekends at home to avoid catching the coronavirus, Sollog, a health department supervisor, 65, fabricates upbeat protective wear with holiday themes and such characters as Winnie the Pooh, to give to her colleagues to boost their morale and replace their loose and worn face coverings. She also provides masks to her elderly mother in Florida, local doctors, friends and their grandkids, and in October, Sollog donated her creations for a fundraiser for 1 in 9/Hewlett House, a Long Island cancer awareness organization.

Her husband, Timothy, 67, who is retired, helps out by cutting elastic for ear loops and metal for nose-bridge wires. And using a rotary cutter, he produces clean, straight edges on layers of fabric that Sollog forms into masks.

From the get-go, Sollog’s charitable efforts have been rooted in her desire to help safeguard the health of front-line workers, including staff at a doctor’s office in Valley Stream and employees at Trader Joe’s in Hewlett.

"It’s something that I can do," Sollog said. "I really feel so grateful to the people willing to risk their own lives to provide services to us."

Throughout Long Island, older adults are among the countless residents who not only share Sollog’s sentiments but are mirroring her actions in using their long-honed sewing skills to voluntarily produce masks for charity's sake.

Along with creating and delivering unsolicited batches of their handmade masks to groups that they feel need them, such as neighbors, hospital staffs and retail employees, sewers are also voluntarily satisfying requests for them.

As a result, the beneficiaries of their altruism run the gamut of people and places, including grocery stores, restaurants, women’s and family shelters, police precincts and fire departments, and animal rescue organizations.

In addition, seniors are joining other Long Islanders in responding to calls for free masks from such grassroots networks as Stitched Together Long Island and Long Island Quilts for Kids. Through social media and word-of mouth, these groups not only attract a wide range of volunteers, including sewers, drivers and fabric cutters, but receive requests for masks.

The communal spirit has also driven individuals and merchants to donate mask-making materials, as in fabric and elastic, to charity-minded sewers. Volunteers also receive supplies from friends and strangers. Plus, it’s not unusual for these sewers to reach into their own wallets to purchase materials or tap their personal inventory of fabric and elastic.

"Anyone who sews is a bit of a fabric hoarder, and just like you can never have too much chocolate, you can’t have too much fabric," said Sollog, who has not only used her own stock and received supplies from friends but has spent her own money on mask-making materials.

The COVID-19 vaccines aren’t likely to put an end to people making or wearing masks anytime soon.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FAQ page, not enough information currently exists to "say if or when" it will stop recommending that the public continue to don masks, as well as avoid close contact with others. Along with experts needing to "understand more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide," other factors, including the number of people who get vaccinated, will affect the CDC’s decision regarding the future of mask wearing, the page noted.

Purposeful projects

Meanwhile, mask-making offers senior volunteers myriad benefits, including reducing their risk of infection by enabling them to shelter safely indoors for an extended period with a purposeful project that satisfies their sense of humanity.

For her team of 100 "active sewers at any time," Carrie Davis, 65, makes masks easy and convenient to create. The founder and chapter coordinator of Patchogue-based Long Island Quilts for Kids, an offshoot of a national organization, Davis provides volunteers with sandwich bags filled with pre-cut fabric and elastic; a single kit produces 10 face coverings.

Morning, noon and night, Davis said, the organization’s sewers can pick up mask kits and drop off their finished handiwork in a chest of drawers on her front porch. Thus far, the group’s volunteers have produced more than 30,000 masks for Long Islanders, including fire and police departments, ambulance companies, hospitals, nursing and group homes, and dialysis centers. It has also dispatched masks to Native American reservations in the western states.

Started a decade ago to provide quilts for critically ill, hospitalized children, the organization today facilitates not only the production of masks but other items, including surgical scrub caps, seat belt protectors for chemotherapy ports and holiday stockings for U.S. service men and women.

"I feel fortunate that I have been given the privilege to make a difference, and all I have to do is pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you?’ And volunteers are there," said Davis, who retired 20 years ago as the director of social services for a skilled nursing facility.

For those who want to help but say they don’t know how to sew, Davis has other jobs — including packing kits, cutting materials and ironing. "My mantra is to leave the world in a better place at the end of each and every day," Davis said.

At Stitched Together Long Island, Huntington Station resident and retired attorney Peter Graber, 63, admits that he can’t sew. Instead he helps the mask-making drive in other ways, as in picking up and delivering finished goods. The grassroots initiative is a joint effort of his wife, Keta Graber, 61, and her sister Becky Morgan, 51, who heads up Stitched Together California and learned about the need for PPE when she was a pharmaceutical rep in the Southern California area.

Since March, the Long Island unit has facilitated the making of an estimated 100,000 masks, and it has distributed them everywhere from food pantries and homeless shelters to major hospitals and nursing homes.

"We started with 10 sewers last March and by the end of three days, once we created a Facebook page for Stitched Together Long Island, we had 800, and requests for masks started coming in," said Keta, a retired special-education teacher.

The Long Island chapter now has more than 500 sewers, with seniors representing the majority as many younger volunteers, such as teachers and health care workers, have returned to their jobs, she said.

The organization generally has about 500 masks on hand if anyone needs them, Peter Graber said.

Muriel Pierre-Louis, 45, is among Stitched Together Long Island’s mask makers.

Before starting her new job as a web designer in November, the Hewlett resident had worked at the crafts retailer Joann’s. While cutting fabric there for a customer, she learned about Stitched Together and joined the mask-making drive nine months ago.

Using supplies that she had purchased with her Joann’s employee discount, Pierre-Louis has so far created about 300 masks. On weekends, she works about six hours a day to ensure a ready supply of finished goods in case Stitched Together posts a request for face-coverings on its Facebook page.

"I just want to help," Pierre-Louis said, "because so many people are suffering now."

'Not alone or forgotten'

According to Jennifer Chang, a philanthropic psychologist and co-founder and co-director at the United Kingdom-headquartered Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, mask-making for charity’s sake has the power to uplift and imbue older adults with a sense of purpose, competence and "relevance to their lives to the outside world."

But mask-making also has its downside. Volunteers risk putting "a lot of strain on both mental and physical health," Chang said, if making masks means "cutting short the time that [they] could have spent talking with some friends on Zoom" or stressing out about not sewing enough.

To avoid such scenarios, Chang recommends producing masks "only to the degree that it increases psychological well-being," which may require them to relax their productivity goals.

Since the pandemic’s start, Glen Head resident Ilze O’Hara, 57, has given away the vast majority of the 1,700 masks that she has made. The recipients of her charity encompass Stitched Together, children’s and meal programs, shelters, ambulance personnel and sanitation collectors. She has also passed out her masks to shoppers in stores.

O’Hara, an ordained Lutheran minister who doesn’t serve a congregation, views her giveaways as a mission — to liberate wearers from angst so they can "live and love."

"We can’t choose the times we live in, but we can choose how we respond," O’Hara said.

Since the pandemic’s start, Stitched Together has supplied Mastic-headquartered NANA’s House, which operates 11 Long Island shelters for the homeless, with masks for residents and staff — even on short notice, according to Wendy Falanga-Smalls, 53, NANA’s executive director.

This fall, about a week or two before the shelter’s children returned to in-person and remote schooling, Falanga-Smalls, who founded the 100-employee NANA’s with her husband and parents, requested masks for the kids’ book bags. In response, Stitched Together, she said, delivered "hundreds" of face-coverings, which enabled each child to start school with 10 masks, including with Paw Patrol, Minnie Mouse and truck designs.

"Just a gesture of giving a mask lets residents feel safe and that they are not alone or forgotten," Falanga-Smalls said. Stitched Together and its volunteers "blessed us and saved lives."

Paying the goodwill forward, Falanga-Smalls recently handed out excess masks, as well as coats, to the mask-less souls waiting at a bus stop near her office.