Thermal Underwear Drive
View 2022 KXAN Coverage of this years event.
Every year, House the Homeless conducts a Thermal Underwear Drive to provide thermal underwear, hats, gloves, scarves, and ponchos for homeless men, women and children in Austin. The drive begins at the House the Homeless Memorial Service and concludes at the Thermal Underwear Party on New Year’s Day.
The 2012 drive resulted in more than 3,500 thermal tops, bottoms, scarves, hats, gloves, etc. that were handed out to more than 600 homeless men, women and children in Austin. Each year it gets bigger.
Please help keep some of Austin’s homeless men, women and children warm this winter by contributing to the Thermal Underwear Drive.
We welcome donations of any amount. We use the donations to buy in bulk to maximize what we can get.
$10 = one thermal top and one thermal bottom.
$35 = one thermal top, one thermal bottom, one hat, one pair of gloves, one scarf and one poncho.
So you can see how just a few dollars can make a big difference!
Click the button below to donate online!
Or, please send a check payable to House the Homeless, Inc to:
House the Homeless
P.O. Box 2312
Austin, TX 78768
Thank you for your never ending support for the folks living on our streets.
Together we can end homelessness.
Richard Troxell
Check out the Event
Anything for a Roof in America
House the Homeless looked at the worldwide dilemma of people who commit crimes for the specific purpose of being locked up. Jail or prison may be just as dangerous as the streets, but at least there are laws requiring that inmates be fed. Then, we zeroed in on the...
Prison As Shelter in the U.S.A.
In Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy retrieves true news about America in the late 1800s. Even then, an arsonist who didn’t get caught might have to turn himself in, because the whole point of the crime was to get in out of the weather and be fed. House the Homeless...
18th Annual Thermal Underwear New Year’s Day Party
HUGSS for the Homeless View the gallery from the event. House the Homeless thanks our volunteers and Hill Country Middle School for making the 18th annual Thermal Underwear New Year's Day Party a great success. Thanks to Mike Reed for the photos below!
2017 Year in Review
Please take a look and download House the Homeless's year in review for 2017. Click Here to Download PDF
Prison As Shelter — A Worldwide Problem
Recently, Kathryn Phelan wrote about the tragedy that brought so many immigrants to America: Forty percent of Ireland’s population died in the mid-1800s, in the Great Famine. Men stole food, either to feed their families or in the hope of going to jail, where they...
State of the Year
Last month, at Austin’s 25th Homeless Memorial, participants read the names of 187 poverty-stricken people who died in Austin this year. Earlier this month, the Austin American-Statesman published a commentary by House the Homeless president Richard R. Troxell. He...
The Very Best Way to Spend New Year’s Day
In case you were wondering if the Thermal Underwear Drive will take place again this year, the answer is, of course! The date is January 1, that’s New Year’s Day, and the place is First Baptist Church, 901 Trinity Street, Austin, TX 78701. Guests will attend from 12...
IH35 BE SAFE BE SEEN — Humanitarian Outreach Project to “Winterize” Homeless Folks Living Under our Bridges-KVUE
Be Seen Be Safe Campaign This is the first media attention on this multi-pronged campaign, that is starting in Austin but has serious national implications (possibly 100,000 people living under our bridges may be affected) as the nation starts to renovate our nation’s...
The SRO — a Much-Needed Housing Solution
The constant shrinkage of the SRO stock (the number of Single Room Occupancy rooms) in America is shameful, and for various historical reasons San Francisco has been particularly hard hit. Recently, Frances Saux wrote: A 1979 study counted 26,884 SRO units in San...
Housing Solutions Shunned and Ignored
Ace Backwords, who has written extensively on homeless issues, used to live in a single-room occupancy building (SRO) in Berkeley, California. Although he employs an inelegant synonym, that’s what he’s talking about here: If they want to solve the homeless problem,...
