Five hundred homeless people in Utah are now a bit warmer, thanks to the Sikh Temple of Utah.
Members of the temple raised money to buy 500 wool blankets, which were distributed to people at several homeless camps in Salt Lake City.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Bachider Singh and Kuljeat Singh bless wool blankets that members of the Sikh community are donating to help the unsheltered stay warm during a blessing ceremony at the Sikh temple in Taylorsville on Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021.
“It was just incredibly generous,” said Carin Crowe, senior director of operations at Salt Lake Valley Habitat for Humanity. “The blankets were absolutely for people who were weathering the worst of the storms out there.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ty Bellamy, with Black Lives for Humanity, and a volunteer named JJ distribute wool blankets donated by the Sikh community to people in camps in Salt Lake City to help the unsheltered stay warm on Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021.
It’s hardly the first time the Sikhs have made a donation like this. Members of the temple have been doing it for many years. It’s part of their religious beliefs.
“We believe in service, community, helping the needy,” said Push Singh. “So that’s what we do every year. We just want to help fellow Americans.”
Sikhs trace their religious roots to northern India. They make up the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, according to the Sikh Coalition, and there are about half a million Sikhs in the United States.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Carin Crowe, of Habitat for Humanity, and Ty Bellamy with Black Lives for Humanity, distribute wool blankets donated by the Sikh community to people in camps in Salt Lake City to help the unsheltered stay warm on Thursday, December 23, 2021.
“We want to help the community,” said Jagdish Gill, a founding member of the Sikh Temple of Utah in Taylorsville. “We just announced that anybody who wanted could contribute, and they gave the money.”
This has long been a personal project for the Gill family — Jagdish and Surjit, who are the parents of Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill. For several years, Surjit Gill — Sim Gill’s mother — has knitted about 500 hats a year that were distributed at The Road Home shelter.
“Whatever little we can do,” Jagdish Gill said, “we have done it.”
Crowe said that as she and Ty Bellamy, president of the Black Lives for Humanity Movement, handed out the blankets, they were met with “overwhelming gratitude” from the recipients.
“There were people in tears — grateful for having this heavy wool blanket,” Crowe said. “It will make a big difference for them. I mean, there are people out there that are suffering. There’s just not enough beds in the shelters and they have no place to go. And so we just can’t forget about them.”
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