by Lucy Holland

Sports Editor

Due to growing panic from the coronavirus pandemic, people can’t find necessities, including toilet paper and paper towels, anywhere. More important to the pandemic, supplies like plastic gloves, hand sanitizer, and face masks are mostly inaccessible to the public and in short supply in virus hot zones. 

Local dress store owner Jennifer Croll is putting her sewing team in Tucson, Arizona – who usually makes dresses for her boutique – to work making cloth masks. The project, appropriately named “Little White Masks” after Croll’s “Little Black Dress” store, has raised more than 7,000 dollars of their 10,000 dollar goal. They make the masks from two pieces of material cut from “a pattern that covers the whole face from side to side and chin to nose, which is the CDC’s recommendation.” 

Croll and her team are distributing as many masks as possible to the local Good Samaritan Hospital, and they plan to begin distributing to firefighters, police officers, mail and delivery workers, and grocery store workers if they get the necessary funds and supplies. They anticipate each mask costing between one dollar and fifty cents and two dollars and fifty cents to manufacture and ship to the Bay Area. Croll’s team has dropped off more than 200 masks at Good Samaritan with more to come.

These masks are a last resort according to the CDC, but Croll says that “this is looking like last resort time” because “anything is better than nothing.” Also, more reports are surfacing about the benefits of wearing masks in public, and according to Jeremy Howard in the Washington Post, “Masks effective at ‘flattening the curve’ can be made at home with nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of scissors.” 

Croll and her team are asking for help from anyone and everyone to share their GoFundMe and donate if they can. They not only need donations to cover the costs but are asking for people to reach out if they have connections to organizations that need masks. If you are interested in donating or sharing, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-quotlittle-white-maskquot-project?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet

If you would like to contact Croll or her team, use littlewhitemaskproject@gmail.com. 

(Sources: Washington Post, GoFundMe)