Trade school students helping provide equipment to healthcare workers

BOSTON — As countries across the world continue to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic, supplies are running low, especially for those on the front lines of the response.

With that in mind, Boston 25 has shown you in our #HeyThanks segment how communities across the state have been stepping up to help each other and specifically healthcare workers. Volunteers have offered to 3-D print and sow masks, provide cleaning supplies and send heartwarming, uplifting messages to nurses and doctors doing their best to save lives while putting theirs at risk.

Students at Boston’s North Bennett Street Trade School are part of the group of people finding a constructive way to help ease the crisis.

For 140 years, the school has been turning out carpenters and other craftsmen, but since it’s been closed for the pandemic, students took all the protective equipment they had lying around that wasn’t being used and decided to donate it to the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless clinic. The clinic says they are at risk of losing $1 million a month because of COVID-19.

“We had in stock masks and gloves and safety glasses, all things that we use as a matter of course for our work,” said Sarah Turner, the school’s president. “Of course we were hearing on the news that these things were in short supply. We got about 300 of the N95 masks over to them. A thousand what’s called Nitrile gloves [and] some safety gloves. We had face shields, we had goggles.”

The school not only donated its unused supplies but put out the word to the trades community to look around and gather up supplies that these days hospitals desperately need.

“And so they can think to themselves, what’s in our back closet, what’s in our cabinet?” said Turner.

Aside from donating supplies, students are also using their skills to help making masks based on instructions from a local company.

“The people working in health care right now are just exactly on the front lines and any support that we can give them and when that comes as an in-person donation given by one person to another, it’s just so meaningful,” said Turner.

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