A 12-year-old boy in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been working hard for a long time to put smiles on the faces of homeless children at Easter this year.
Josh Sowden has a huge heart partly because he experienced similar difficulties as the children he is trying to serve, WBZ News reported Thursday.
His original goal was to gather enough donations for 175 Easter baskets that would go to local children living in homeless shelters. When community members and people across the nation heard about the project, they stepped in to help.
Video footage shows Sowden sitting amongst all of the donated gifts for the children:
In a social media post on March 23, Josh’s Easter Baskets for the homeless social media page made a special announcement about the project.
“From the bottom of our hearts thank you to everyone who came and helped we believe 300 plus kids will be very happy,” the page said in reference to the hundreds of Easter baskets the effort produced:
From the bottom of our hearts thank you to everyone who came and helped we believe 3️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ plus kids will be very happy 😊
Posted by Josh's Easter Baskets for the homeless on Saturday, March 23, 2024
Sixty of the 300 baskets went to infants, and an extra 100 donated eggs were given to a nonprofit group called Community of Love and Support Project which assisted Sowden’s family when they had nowhere to live.
The generous young man explained, “After our story really kept blowing up, we got over 300. To know that all those people wanted to help and be a part of it and make it grow felt really nice.”
The age old tradition of exchanging such baskets is believed to have come from the medieval Catholic community, according to MarthaStewart.com:
To celebrate the end of Lent, they would bring baskets of delicious goods to church in order to be blessed by a priest. All of these symbols of fertility were passed down through the ages—the bunny, the eggs, and the basket itself—to be reimagined into the Easter traditions we hold dear to us today.
After collecting the goodies, Sowden took them to homeless shelters across Massachusetts with help from the Worcester Railers hockey team whose mascot surprised the children receiving the gifts.
Now, Sowden and his family hope to create a nonprofit to do the same thing in the future.
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