Community comes together to produce 450 masks for local essential workers

They saw a need and began to fill it, producing 450 masks for essential workers of Graham. Local churches came together and through a couple ‘God Winks,’ were able to get masks completed and distributed in a 24-hour span.

With the continued effects of COVID-19 impacting the country, the Center for Disease Control was recommending masks, especially homemade ones, to be worn by individuals when they went out.
Isabel Smith, a member of the First United Methodist Church in Graham, quickly saw that there may be a need for masks in the community and began to gather women across the community to make

handmade masks. She was able to get a team together to make 450 masks for the community.

“Little things that the news media was already saying, dropping hints here and there, that we were going to be moving in that direction (recommendation to wear masks),” Smith said. “So I just decided that for sure our essential workers out in the community needed masks (...) I moved in that direction and contacted my church and asked them.”

When Smith contacted FUMC she knew that there was a group of women that made Prayer Quilts and oftentimes there were scraps left over, but she wanted to make sure she got to okay from officials before continuing.

“They thought it was a great idea, but we also knew we needed approval from our Young County Health Authority, Dr. Pat Martin. Because we didn’t want all the sudden, before it was becoming an official thing or state mandated, and we didn’t know what it would turn into, so we didn’t want people to go panic about it,” Smith said. “We contacted Dr. Martin and he gave us a great, thumbs up on it. Then we proceeded on it.”

The FUMC furnished all the fabric through all the scraps they had from quilt making, with Debbie Maddy volunteering to cut all the masks into the correct pattern to be sewn. Smith was able to find some different videos on different types of masks you can make, and chose to go with a simpler one, but still making sure that people’s nose and mouth were covered by it.

Once Smith was able to get FUMC behind this, she needed to identify the need in the community. Smith knew that the city of Graham serves a lot of people and would need masks and that they had requests from Elmcroft for some masks as well for their staff, but she knew there were more places that would need them.

“That’s when I got on the phone and called the Graham Police Department, Graham Fire Department, United (Supermarkets), the hospital, places like Dollar General, all the auto part stores in Graham, the places like Donuts Supreme, anyone that we could think of that was actually out there still having to do one-on-one business with the public is who we wanted to be sure to get the masks to,” Smith said. “Thank goodness we don’t have the numbers that the big Metroplex cities have as far as cases, we knew that our hospitals would be well stocked in masks. But as something to fall back on because of course these are washable and can be sanitized that way.”

Once they were able to identify the need and get numbers for each place, they were able to make sure that they had enough masks for everyone. Smith said she was racing against time, knowing that there could be a possibility of the community being mandated to wear a mask within days.

The idea came on a Tuesday and by Wednesday and Thursday there was a plan in place and they began to activate it. Smith said this would have never been possible had it not been for the sewers who stepped up to sew masks together. She did not want just FUMC to be involved, and thought back to the days where all churches worked together with the Graham Area Church Women, she reached out to women from other churches she knew.

“In times like this you want to unite your community, and work together. You want to keep people busy, keep them going with a plan, something to do,” Smith said. “Since I was racing against time. I literally just sat there and thought of people that I knew that went to all these different churches. I started making phone calls to that particular friend or contact that I had in that church and told them what I was doing, could you just take it upon yourself to contact whoever in your church you know that they sew. We were racing against time and really didn’t have the time to sit there and make thousands of phone calls.”

The churches that participated were True Life Pentecostal, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Oak Street Baptist Church, First Baptist Church of Graham, Oasis of Grace, First Presbyterian, Eastside Church of Christ, HighRidge Church and FUMC. In addition to the churches, Becky Gough called and said she would like to sew some masks and took over making masks for the city of Graham. Between the nine churches and Gough there were 32 women that sewed masks for the community.

Smith said with the race against time, she contacted as many people as she could, but knows many other women would have loved to help from different churches.

She said there were many ‘God-Winks’, defined as an event or personal experience that is seen as a sign of divine intervention, throughout this project that allowed it to come to fruition.

“It is beautiful to me, this project would have not happened without so many ‘God Winks’ it was unbelievable. We knew that we lacked the city of Graham (after calling all the places) and we had run out of masks, so we were sitting there thinking, ‘oh no what are we going to do?’ In an instant, literally that’s when the text from Becky Gough came in and she said ‘Isabel just found out you were doing this, how can I help? Can I make more masks?’ I was like ‘oh my gosh’, this was literally as texts were coming in and I said yes,” Smith said. “One of the big things that people have started to do is make the health masks, elastic can not be found anywhere. So I found Francis Vaughn, who owns Francis Fabrics, and she very kindly and graciously donated probably over 250 yards of elastic. Just donated it.”

Smith said this project was definitely a community effort, and she found joy in being able to put the project together.

The sewing of the masks occurred between 3 p.m. on Monday afternoon when the materials were picked up to Tuesday at 3 p.m. when they were brought back sewed and washed. In a matter of 24 hours 32 women from nine churches were able to produce 450 masks for the community of Graham.

“It was a just a great project to do, especially before Easter. It made people feel very blessed to be in a small community with all the teamwork we got from everybody.”