West Orange Teacher/Resident Collecting Sleeping Bags for Homeless & Set Up A GoFundMe for a Former Student’s Family

WEST ORANGE, NJ — If the name Susan Palmucci sounds familiar to you, it could be because she organizes monthly clothing collections at the high school and posts them on social media. She’s a West Orange resident who teaches in Newark and has had homeless students in her classes, so she wants to help people in need.

Palmucci shared, “I have seen the homeless population grow over the last 25 years that I’ve been teaching in Newark. This is my eighth year preparing food for Thanksgiving Eve and distributing sleeping bags. My first year, we gave out about 40 or 50 bag lunches that were made for us by a group of girls in Livingston that decided to do a community service project together.” She continued, “One year I had Girl Scouts peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we added to our bags of turkey sandwiches and snacks. My daughter Madison and I load up the car on Thanksgiving eve and drive around Newark Penn Station.”

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Palmucci said that they offer the food to people and ask them if they’d like a sleeping bag as well. She estimates that she’s given out hundreds of sleeping bags and comforters. “Around the holidays, I think about what I have, and what I don’t have. I think about how it could always be worse, like it is for so many. It’s just a small way of giving back that I made a tradition with my daughter,” she explained.

If you can donate food or a sleeping bag/comforter, please email susanpalmucci@verizon.net .

Palmucci recently discovered that her former student and the student's family will lose their spot at their homeless shelter next week. She reported, “[They’ve] been living in a shelter since the beginning of the summer and will be officially homeless on October 5. Due to limits on how long people can stay in a shelter and lack of funding, the mom and her four children will be put out of the shelter onto the street. This literally is breaking my heart.”

She set up a GoFundMe campaign hoping to help the family. All the money will be used to put her in an inexpensive hotel for four to six months until the mom can get on her feet. Palmucci also asks people to please share the GoFundMe campaign on their social media pages because every donation helps.

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