Fall is coming to a close as the wind blows its colorful leaves across the campus lawn. The community has already started to say goodbye to 80 degree weather and beach days, but not everyone is prepared to say hello to flurries of snow and building snowmen. As winter nears and temperatures start to dip below freezing, some people are in need of a certain necessity. 

Socks. Good, warm socks.

The Student Nurses Association is running Soctober, an event to collects socks during the month of October to donate to local organizations, said Ren Rowell, a co-chair of Soctober and nursing student.

There are donation boxes located throughout campus, including a box in Jamrich, West Science, Weston and in the dorms. The group hopes to collect a total of 200 new pairs for men and women, but will take any donations, said nursing student and co-chair Emily Long.

“It feels good to help out the people in the community,” said Long. “I’m not just giving socks to some really big business or corporation.”

There are other ways to help. Just by getting the word out, the group is more likely to receive the much-needed sock donations. When Long’s mother came to visit from Minnesota, she brought with her two large bags full of donated socks. Long’s mother had spread the word to her co-workers and shared a post on Facebook about donating socks. Even Long’s aunt had the idea to pay for a pair of socks from Target and asked Long to pick the socks up via curbside pick-up. 

“Picking up the order was really nice and simple,” said Long, who has family members who are sending socks from Montana and Florida. 

Next year, Long hopes that they will be able to have a box at the hospital to help with donations and that they are able to better publicize the event. The Student Nurses Association spent a lot of time at the hospital and a lot of the students work at the hospital this year. 

“I thought it would be a nice way to connect the hospital with the school and the community in general,” said Long. “Just having a source of people where they know that they are able to donate.”

Both Long and Rowell volunteered to co-chair the event. The planning for the fundraiser took four or five hours spread out across a couple of days. The duo made posters, created the bins and called around to make sure they were able to put bins in the various locations they had decided on.

“It sounded fun and I personally like to do creative things,” said Long.

SNA is hoping to get enough donations to donate to more than one organization because there is such a need for good, warm socks in the homeless community.

“There have been reports of residents who didn’t really have [a] pair of socks,” said Rowell. “They were diabetic so foot health was a really big issue.”

Wearing socks is something that can easily be taken for granted, but in an area that gets as cold as Marquette does during the winter, the need for good, warm socks is even higher.