The Santa Clara Council of the St. Vincent de Paul Society is comprised of 26 parish conferences which come together to address diocese-wide social concerns; however, the principal work of each parish conference is to organize outreach services for families in the local community who are in need of assistance.

The southernmost conference in the Santa Clara Council is St. Catherine's Parish Conference in Morgan Hill, led by conference president Brian Cunningham. As part of its community outreach effort, St. Catherine's conference initiated a grass roots clothing program for the needy this summer. The program has three phases -collections, sorting, and distribution - and uses Vincentian volunteers and friends to assist local children in need of clothing.

The parish conference printed collection bags with the St. Vincent de Paul logo especially for this effort, using an oversized shopping bag as the base model. In early June, over 600 bags were distributed to parishioners after Sunday masses at Sl. Catherine's, with a request for "new or like new" clothing for children between the ages 2 to 18. Two weeks later, parishioners returned over 700 pounds of excellent quality clothing, which was stored in the garage of Anne and Franco Spoldi, active Vincentians at St. Catherine's.

In August, nearly twenty Vincentian volunteers from Sl. Catherine's parish gathered in Anne's garage and sorted the clothing by size, age and gender, and stored them in 44 plastic stackable clear boxes. Friends of the parish SVDP conference also helped out with the sorting and had a lot of fun, with many deciding to join the parish conference.

The final part of the effort in the clothing project is distributing the clothes to the families who can best use them. The conference created a clothing request card and is distributing it to 15 agencies and centers that assist families in need of clothing, rental assistance and food in Southern Santa Clara County. Collaboration with these service agencies is the focal point for distributing the cloth-ing to the most needy and poor in the community.

According to available statistics, there are 4,000 families in Southern Santa Clara County that go hungry each month. These are the families that the St. Vincent de Paul conference at St. Catherine's serve.

According to Anne Spoldi, St. Catherine's SVDP Clothes Closet director, "We are trying to assist others in need of children's clothing, using no store, no overhead, and no payroll."