CHICAGO — As Chicago launches into months of winter weather, few items are more valuable than a warm coat.

Yet nonprofits and community organizations that run winter coat drives say they are facing a serious shortage of donations this year as they try to help homeless and low-income Chicagoans weather the cold.

Charities across Chicagoland rev up their annual drives over the holiday season, including for Christmas toys, books and food, in campaigns that aim to tap into people’s end-of-year generosity. But a plethora of nonprofits that collect and distribute coats to low-income, homeless, immigrant or refugee communities expected a deluge of holiday donors that never came this year.

The nonprofit Cradles to Crayons Chicago, which runs one of the city’s largest coat and winter clothing drives, entered this year’s holiday season hoping to provide 50,000 warm coats to children from low-income and homeless families. Their annual “Gear Up for Winter” drive runs from Oct. 1 through February.

However, as of the start of last week, the organization found itself almost “completely out of coats” because of a drop in donations, according to Executive Director Dawn Melchiorre. Cradles to Crayons’ warehouse in North Center had been emptied out, with only about 23,000 coats distributed so far.

“We really can’t put our finger on what it is,” Melchiorre said. “Last year, we gave out almost 43,000 coats … and were probably at about 30,000 coats at this point last year. So we’re significantly thousands behind.”

With scientists predicting Chicago could see a colder and wetter winter this season due to the La Nina climate pattern, many organizers of coat drives of all scales say they are worried about the dangers that might result from lackluster donation numbers.

“You’ve got to look at it as the humanitarian crisis that it is and know that people can’t be walking around in weather like we had last week,” said Liz Kohlbeck, founder and coordinator of St. Chrys’ Closet, which collects and distributes clothes, at Church of the Ascension on the Near North Side. “These are people and not statistics … We need to make sure that they’ve got coats and boots and hats and scarves and gloves and mittens.”

Some nonprofit leaders have attributed this year’s unexpected coat shortage to cost pressures due to inflation, as well as decreased attention on the issue of insufficient cold weather clothing as compared with last winter during an influx of migrants to the city.

In the winter of 2023, Kohlbeck said, when the struggles of asylum-seekers were “so in our face” in the news, “people that probably hadn’t cleaned things out in years were doing so” in order to donate warm clothing. She recalls vans full of “hundreds of coats” from the Chicago suburbs arriving at Church of the Ascension, where an old worship space has been filled from wall to wall with clothing racks.

St. Chrys’ Closet received and distributed somewhere between 2,300 to 2,500 coats last winter, according to Kohlbeck. In terms of this year’s donations, however, “we’re talking hundreds rather than thousands of coats coming in,” she said.

To try to make up for the gap, St. Chrys’ Closet leadership has mobilized to collect cash donations from local churches and private donors, which they’ve used to purchase new coats in bulk.

At the church recently, Kohlbeck pointed out a few boxes of shrink-wrapped coats, which she said had already taken too long to arrive given delays due to holiday delivery traffic. Some of the new coats had already been distributed at homeless encampments, she said.

The shortage at St. Chrys’ Closet has rippled out to social service organizations across the city that typically rely on receiving coats and winter clothing from them, Kohlbeck said. From some of these partners, Kohlbeck has received requests for “hundreds” of coats, which they would “just come and take today in a nanosecond” if they could, she said.

“Everybody has been coming to us looking for coats, and we just didn’t have them,” Kohlbeck said.

The annual winter holiday drive for Heartland Human Care Services’ Refugee and Immigrant Community Services branch has been off to a disappointing start, according to the supervisor of community engagement, Joshua Grizzard.

They’ve seen lower numbers for both secondhand coat donations and purchases from the nonprofit’s Amazon “wish list” of winter clothing, Grizzard said. They typically collect and donate between 400 to 600 coats each year to their refugee and immigrant clients.

“The migrant crisis was very much in the news last year, and I wonder if that really helped drive our donation drive,” Grizzard said. “But I wonder if it kind of feels old news or maybe that was last year’s hot topic or something.”

He added that with inflation, people may have “a little less” to give. However, his organization is continuing to do outreach to find donors for the coat drive — “just a lot of cold-calling, trying to spread the word and leveraging our networks,” Grizzard said.

“For folks who are coming through the resettlement program, most of them are just arriving with what’s on their back, what’s in their suitcases, and many are coming from warm climates, and it’s quite a shock when they arrive here,” Grizzard said. “(They have) very limited financial resources, there’s very limited cash assistance that they are eligible for, but coats can be expensive.”

The 36th annual Chicago Bears Coat Drive, held in partnership with the Salvation Army and Jewel-Osco, is down about 4,000 coats compared with mid-December of last year, according to K. Kendall Mathews, the Salvation Army’s associate Chicago-area commander.

The coat drive’s organizers are “really looking to have a big push” to attract more donations before January and February, which are typically the coldest months of the winter, Mathews said. Donations of new or gently used coats will be accepted through February at drop-off boxes at local Jewel-Osco locations.

With the goal of collecting 20,000 coats in total this winter, Salvation Army has only received about 7,000 coats so far, according to Mathews.

Yet the demand for free warm coats remains as strong as ever, if not stronger.

“The need is up, the need is great right now,” Mathews said. “People are having to make a decision these days. Should they get a coat? Should they buy toys for their children, or should they pay their utility bills or get food?”

Cradles to Crayons has seen a “huge spike” in need over the past few years, Melchiorre said, as an influx of migrant families — many of whom arrived with young children — has joined Chicago’s existing population of homeless and low-income residents.

Homeless Chicagoans are rarely able to store winter clothing for long periods of time, which means that each year, “as soon as it gets cold, they kind of have to start from scratch,” said Sarah Boone, who helps coordinate The Chicago Help Initiative’s winter clothing drive.

This year, the homeless community has been “moved around so much” through multiple encampment clearings, which could have led to coats being left behind or thrown away by the city, Kohlbeck said.

On Saturday morning, 43-year-old Crystal Cadena, who has been homeless since she lost her job in May, lined up outside the headquarters of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago to get a thick black winter coat from The Chicago Help Initiative.

During the coldest days of last week, Cadena said she “couldn’t take it.” Previously, she had been wearing an ill-fitting coat that she got at a similar distribution event in March, where they “only had extra large” even though Cadena is a size small.

When she was homeless in Chicago a previous time, from 2007 to 2011, Cadena recalled trying to weather a blizzard by layering hoodies and coats.

“I know what it’s like to be in need of a coat, especially in the winter time, and just being outside with nowhere to go and the nights are extremely cold,” Cadena said.

The Chicago Help Initiative typically distributes over 300 coats annually, according to Boone. They were the only organization interviewed that said they haven’t seen an overall decrease in donations this winter, although they are in particular experiencing a shortage of men’s coats.

At their weekly meal and coat distribution event, Cadena also received a hat, gloves, hand warmers, foot warmers and a winter blanket.

“It is a need,” Cadena said. “With the economy, even with the pandemic, a lot of people was facing food insecurity, job insecurity. And so whoever was blessed to give to me, I am touched by it … It’s difficult for people like me.”

If they can’t donate coats themselves, Kohlbeck urged people to “dig a little deeper in their pockets” this holiday season to give money to local nonprofits that can buy and distribute coats in bulk, which can help compensate for inadequate donations. Nonprofits can purchase high volumes of coats at significantly lower prices than an individual shopper, she noted.

“It’s hard to be living in the circumstances that people have been living in,” Kohlbeck said. “If everybody could hear the stories, you can’t help but want to open your pockets and do something about it.”

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