Twice a year, the Ordway Auditorium at the Teton County Library in Jackson turns into something between a closet, a supply depot and a workshop. Tables fill with coats and boots, sleeping bags and tarps, travel-sized shampoo and new socks. Neighbors sort through what they need. Other neighbors, including children, sit down to assemble health and hygiene kits. Nobody pays, nobody shows a ticket, and nobody is asked to explain why they came.
The next installment, called Love Your Neighbor, runs Thursday, Oct. 22, from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the library's auditorium. It is a joint effort between the library and the Spread the Love Commission, a Jackson-based national nonprofit that gathers and delivers critical supplies to people who are unhoused or housing insecure. The fall and winter edition is built around the practical arithmetic of a Teton County cold snap: warm layers, dry feet, a way to charge a phone, something to put between a body and the ground.
The donation list reads like a survival checklist rather than a clothing drive. Alongside fleeces, coats, jeans, belts, beanies and neck buffs, the organizers ask for sneakers and boots with good tread, long underwear, emergency blankets, hand and feet warmers, sleeping bags and mats, backpacks and duffle bags in all sizes, tents, bungee cords, zip ties, new tarps, flashlights and headlamps, small cooking stoves, small propane, reusable water bottles, unlocked and factory-reset cell phones with chargers, and AA and AAA batteries. The hygiene side is deliberately travel-sized: hand sanitizer, shampoo and conditioner, body lotion, lip balm, deodorant, razors, shaving cream, high-SPF sunscreen, combs, tissue packs, face wipes, sanitary supplies, bandages, first aid kits, dental supplies, diapers and diaper cream. There is also a food list, heavy on things that need no kitchen: cans and packs of tuna, Cup Noodles, peanut butter, oatmeal packs, electrolyte and Emergen-C packets, breakfast bars.
Donors are asked to bring clean, new or gently used items in complete sets that suit the season, with new socks, underwear and shoelaces especially welcome. Attendees who arrive empty-handed are not turned away; the event is pitched as much at people who need supplies as at people who want to help assemble kits. The library has described the kit-making as a family activity, an invitation to bring kids and put them to work stuffing toothpaste and razors into bags.
The partnership has become a recurring rhythm on the library calendar. A summer edition of Love Your Neighbor ran in July, focused on warm-weather clothing and rain gear, and earlier versions have been staged with the Teton County Taskforce for the Unhoused. The format is consistent: the library supplies a central, accessible, indoor room with parking and no threshold, and Spread the Love supplies the inventory and the relationships.
That inventory comes from a story that began far from Jackson. Spread the Love's founder and executive director, Wren Fialka, first encountered people living on the street as a child in Washington, D.C., and carried the subject with her for years without feeling she was doing enough. In December 2014, a conversation with a man living on the street in San Francisco changed that. He gave her what amounted to a shopping list of the things people actually needed, and she and one resourceful friend took that list and ran a first outreach. The organization's own account describes it as the moment Spread the Love was born, and it identified the principle that has driven the work since: the connection between people who are unhoused and people who are not is as important as the supplies themselves.
Friends and family amplified that first effort on social media, and more distributions followed across the country. In September 2016, after more than a dozen of them, the group became a national 501(c)(3). Fialka has described putting her savings into the work alongside donations from local businesses and support from a few friends, then traveling to places with large homeless populations, among them San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, New York City and Washington, D.C., handing out care packages built from what people told her they needed. By its own count the organization has completed more than 70 distributions, delivering over $750,000 worth of supplies and clothing to 40 locations, much of it done with a staff of one and a Honda Element named Javier.
Salt Lake City has been a frequent destination, and the reasons are not abstract. In a piece published by the organization, Fialka is described standing on a snowy median on a four-lane downtown street three blocks from Interstate 15, tarps set up with donated clothes and shoes and tables of toiletries and hygiene kits, in the week before Christmas, the same weekend Salt Lake City's mayor announced 95 additional shelter beds after five people reportedly died in freezing temperatures. Closer to home, reporting carried by the organization describes Teton County citing unhoused residents for trespassing as temperatures dropped, and Jackson police fielding a dozen calls about people facing homelessness in a two-week stretch, with officials effectively sending some people to Salt Lake City, a practice advocates have called inhumane.
Jackson is a wealthy resort town ringed by public land, and the gap between its median income and its least secure residents is part of what makes an event like Love Your Neighbor necessary. Winter here is not a metaphor. Snow can arrive in October and stay into May, and the difference between a good sleeping bag and a wet one is not comfort but safety. That is why the fall edition of the drive leans so hard on gear: tents, tarps, bungee cords, hand warmers, headlamps, batteries, a way to boil water.
The organization has since added a vehicle that suits that mission better than a small SUV. Its first outreach truck, as Spread the Love describes it, began life as a 1989 Mercedes fire engine, spent time as a coffee truck, and is now being built out to collect and deliver supplies, pour hot and cold drinks and offer support to unhoused neighbors locally and regionally. The group's phrasing is that the truck is getting back to its roots as the lifesaver it was meant to be.
For anyone in the valley who wants a hand in it, the mechanics on Oct. 22 are simple. Show up between 2:30 and 6:30 p.m. at the Teton County Library on Virginian Lane. Bring a complete set of seasonally appropriate clothing or gear if you have it, or bring nothing and help pack kits. Leave with supplies if you need them. The library has noted that on days when it closes early, donations can still be dropped at the north entrance near the Ordway auditorium, so it is worth checking the event listing before hauling a carload over.
What the organizers are after is less a one-day giveaway than a habit: a few hours in a warm room, a table of useful things, and the recognition that the person across from you might be the one who needs the coat, or the one who brought it.