Two hundred thousand. Incredible! That’s the number of sweaters you readers have knit—and crocheted—for children all over the globe as part of Knit for Kids, the GUIDEPOSTS knitting project. As head of Guideposts Outreach, it shouldn’t surprise me how willing you readers are to help. Yet who could have foreseen eight years ago when one of our editors wrote a short article about knitting sweaters for poor children that your response would be so overwhelming? After all, we didn’t ask you to do this. You took it upon yourselves.
    Shortly after that fateful article, requests started coming in to our editorial offices for a pattern. Some didn’t even wait for a pattern. They just started knitting. And sending us the results. Soon boxes of sweaters were stacked everywhere. The editors brought in a couple of interns to handle shipping the sweaters to relief agencies for distribution. That’s where Outreach came in. We got in touch with the folks at World Vision, Heart to Heart International and other organizations that could get the sweaters to the kids who needed them, from Bosnia to Rwanda, and even here at home.
    Of course, readers wanted to know where the sweaters were going. Every time we published an article showing children from needy areas wrapped in a brightly colored batch of the garments, the editors braced for another avalanche of sweaters to show up in the mailroom.
    Finally, managing the flow of sweaters became too big a job for the editors in New York City. Guideposts Outreach Division here in upstate Pawling, New York, took over, and receiving, repacking and distributing the sweaters you send in is now our job. We also gave the sweater project a new name, one that pretty much describes what it is: Knit for Kids.
    That brings us to Joan McKeon, of Scottsdale, Arizona. Last winter Knit for Kids passed the 200,000-sweater mark with a box of sweaters sent
by Joan. Like most knitters, she enclosed a note. “Shortly after I sent you 38 sweaters last year,” Joan wrote, “I read an article in the April 2003 GUIDEPOSTS about sweaters being sent to organizations in Uzbekistan. I couldn’t help but think of how much joy a sweater brings to a child. I work full time at Saint Bernadette’s Catholic Church in Scottsdale. I found it frustrating that I could not knit more sweaters.”
    That’s where a remarkable young man she knows named Jay came in. Jay was brain damaged in a car wreck when he was 22 years old. He spent two years in hospitals and rehabs. Doctors operated on him more than 15 separate times. It was over a year before he could even speak again.
    Today, at 40, Jay is confined to a wheelchair and has limited use of only one arm. All the same, Jay is an usher at Saint Bernadette’s, where Joan works, and a tireless volunteer at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital. Joan wrote, “Jay was a potter. He still believes that someday he’ll be able to throw a pot with his good hand. Now that’s inspiring. I figured that if Jay could reach out to help people with just one good arm, and keep his dreams alive in the face of all that’s happened to him, I could figure out a way to knit more sweaters.”
    That’s when inspiration struck. Joan remembered a 1998 GUIDEPOSTS article that mentioned a sweater knitter who was blind. If Joan could teach herself to knit without looking, she could knit just about anywhere at any time.
    “It was my greatest multitasking challenge ever!” she says.
    “I knit at lunch, at staff meetings, at choir rehearsal, at my Weight Watchers meetings, even at the movies. I joined a gym about a year ago, and I bring my knitting with me.” Joan found herself staying longer on her exercise bike, just so she could finish another row of stitches. Who knew that knitting could burn so many calories?
    “Most of the time,” Joan says, “we learn how to do things from our parents, like riding a bicycle or tying our shoelaces. But this time, it’s the parent who has learned from the child. You see, Jay is my son. I thank God each and every day for his presence in my life.”
    What’s the secret to 200,000 sweaters? Multi-tasking, if you ask Joan. But also multi-caring by thousands and thousands of GUIDEPOSTS readers for whom knitting a simple and colorful sweater is like reaching around the world and giving a child a hug. 

The above article originally appeared in the October 2004 issue of Guideposts. To subscribe to Guideposts click here.