Chris Bailey Helps Dallas’s Homeless Stay Warm With Thousands of Donated Sleeping Bags
After a tragedy, Chris Bailey started a sleeping bag drive, helping thousands of homeless individuals stay warm
At the beginning of 2018, Chris Bailey’s heart ached as he watched the local news and learned that a woman had been found slumped over in a wheelchair, having frozen to death on a platform of the light rail system in Dallas.
That poor woman, Chris thought on that frigid January night. Nobody should have to get that cold and suffer like that.
He turned to his wife, Wendie, and said, “There’s got to be something we can do.”
Then the idea came to him: Let’s provide people in need with warm sleeping bags!
The next day, Chris, a contractor who owns a foundation repair company, started a sleeping bag drive. He created an Amazon wish list to request Coleman sleeping bags, which cost about $42 each, then spread the word on social media. Quickly, many generous people stepped in, and Chris got a few hundred sleeping bags shipped to his house in Trophy Club, Texas.
Chris loaded the sleeping bags onto a truck and delivered them to areas of the Dallas–Fort Worth region, where people experiencing homelessness tend to gather. They not only use the sleeping bags to sleep in if they don’t go to a shelter bed at night but they wrap the bags around themselves during the day to stay warm.
Chris has had many moving encounters with grateful recipients, and he especially remembers the woman named Rebecca in the blue-and-white striped sweater.
“Oh my gosh, I slept right here on this sidewalk last night and all I had was this sweater,” Rebecca told Chris after a frigid night of 29 degrees. “Thanks so much for this sleeping bag!”
Warming bodies and hearts
Chris’ project rapidly grew as word spread, and now he gets as many as 300 Amazon boxes delivered per day full of sleeping bags. Often, an Amazon truck comes back several times in one day—including one that Chris discovered was driven by a woman struggling with homelessness herself and living in a shelter. He was able to offer her a sleeping bag too.
Chris enlisted his two adult children to store the piles of boxes in their garages and regularly load up a trailer for a distribution run, with the help of some local schoolboys who volunteer.
One of the boys is Brooke Hellstern’s son, Nolan, who was in third grade. Nolan’s Little League baseball team started working with Chris as a community service project and filled up batting cages with hundreds of boxed sleeping bags.
“Chris instilled the want and desire in the boys to help others,” says Brooke, 50. “He also helped them see that there’s an amazing benefit to lending a hand!”
Seeing how great the need was, Chris made a resolution to repeat the sleeping bag drive at the end of the year—and every year thereafter. Every holiday season, Chris collects and passes out sleeping bags, and people donate about 2,000 sleeping bags between December 26 and January 31.
Spreading joy
Chris didn’t stop at the sleeping bag drives. The day after five Dallas city and transit police officers were tragically shot and killed on July 7, 2016, Chris bought a white poster board and black marker and wrote “Everybody Love Everybody” and held up his sign along a busy street.
Drivers honked and waved, and passersby gave hugs. Chris did this for an hour every day for about a year and a half, and now does it every July 7 in -memory of the slain officers.
Wanting to make spreading acts of kindness an everyday, long-term thing, Chris started the Facebook page called Everybody Love Everybody after the Dallas tragedy. People post inspiring acts of kindness. Chris also does many other drives to help people in need: a toy drive for local children before Christmas, a sock drive, a diaper drive and even an Easter egg drive.
It warms Chris’ heart to have the chance to help. “I just want to make today a little better than yesterday, and a sleeping bag can change someone’s life. In fact, it can save their life,” says Chris, 58. “I try to always be nice to people who need someone to be nice to them, to brighten their day. When I do stuff like this, it just makes me feel joyful, like a better person.”
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