Cape Realtors Association Pays it Forward

Sunny Fellman, chair of the Cape Cod & Islands Association of Realtors Young Professionals Network, with the donations that her organization dropped off to HAC this month. They will eventually go to HAC clients who are transitioning out of shelter and into permanent housing.

By themselves, backpacks, clothes hangers, towels, kitchen utensils, pillows and notebooks are relatively ordinary, everyday items. But to a select group of HAC clients they will represent a way to move forward with their lives.

At the beginning of September, these were just a few of the new household goods that Patricia Pry, marketing director for the Cape Cod & Islands Association of Realtors, and Sunny Fellman, chair of the association’s Young Professionals Network, delivered to HAC.

The association collected the items as part of its latest drive for HAC’s Welcome Home Gift Basket Program. They will be given to families and individuals to help in their transition from shelter into permanent housing.

As part of the drive, Pry went to the Kmart in Hyannis to purchase some goods. While checking out, she struck up a conversation with a woman in line, explaining these items were going to HAC. That woman told Pry she had been a HAC client “and she may have been a recipient” of the Welcome Home Gift Basket Program, Pry said.

“We exchanged info and I had tears in my eyes,” Pry said. “It was a real pay it forward moment for me.”

“That is our ‘why’,” Fellman said, explaining why the association has conducted these drives in the past and will continue to do so in the future. “For us it is really touching to see the people benefitting from this.”