The Kansas Wesleyan University Men’s Volleyball team was hard at work Thursday, loading thousands of quilts into a truck, helping a Salina church participate in a worldwide humanitarian effort.

Salina’s St. John’s Lutheran Church was a drop-off location for over a dozen counties in Northcentral Kansas, as part of a Lutheran World Relief Ingathering event. An Ingathering is a collection event, where congregations and individuals donate handmade quilts and other relief kits to be sent to people in need around the world.

During these events, volunteers receive donations including:

• Quilts
• Care Kits
• School Kits

Volunteers then coordinate the shipping of all items gathered. The items in Salina are shipped to Minneapolis, Minnesota. From there they are sent to wherever they are needed, across the country or across the world. 

As vehicles from all across the region arrived full of boxes, the volleyball players unloaded all of them, and then relocated them high and tight in a large box truck.

The Lutheran World Relief effort began in the United States at the end of World War II. Its mission is to tackle global poverty, by helping people adapt to the challenges that threaten their livelihoods and well-being.

The bulk of the items gathered in Salina were quilts. Congregation members from St John’s in Salina work all year making quilts, privately at home and at monthly gatherings at the church. They have been doing this for decades, literally making thousands of quilts over the years.  The last several years have been very productive:

• 2022 – 1,274 quilts
• 2023 – 1,111 quilts
• 2024 – 1,341 quilts

It’s unknown where each specific quilt will end up. It could be keeping a child warm following a hurricane in the United States, or be covering a soldier in a war-torn part of the world, or be delivered wherever needed following a natural disaster. What is known though,  is that each quilt is full of love, and hope.

CLICK PHOTOS TO ENLARGE