Dewar goes for gold
Seniors Nancy Dedman, Zoe Cote, Kemper Lowry, and Elena Dewar show off the mural they created to brighten up the Hope Supply warehouse. photo courtesy of Elena Dewar
October 12, 2020
Rain-filled tennis shoes slosh around the room, narrowly avoiding the half-empty paint cans and scattered paper stencils. Wiping water away from her eyes, senior Elena Dewar works to keep the wall in front of her as dry as possible. Next to her, classmates Kemper Lowry, Nancy Deadman and Zoe Cote race to complete a mural at a Hope Supply warehouse as part of Dewar’s Girl Scout Gold Award project.
Joining in Lower School, Dewar has been a part of Girl Scouts ever since, completing her Bronze and Silver Awards before taking on Girl Scouts’ highest award, the Gold Award, beginning in her sophomore year. Dewar had been volunteering for Hope Supply Co. for several years and knew she wanted to focus her project on the organization.
“I’ve been volunteering with them since I was a kid through the National Charity League and I have a pretty close relationship with a lot of the workers there, so I kind of knew that was the issue I wanted to address,” Dewar said.
The non-profit works to meet the needs of families facing homelessness in North Texas. As a non-profit, it relies on financial and material donations from the community. To help the company, Dewar organized a gift drive during the holiday season as half of her two-part project. The gifts went to a partner organization of Hope Supply, The Family Place.
“We gathered 200 toys in donations and donated them to The Family Place, which was awesome,” Dewar said.
Dewar worked with a contact at Hope Supply who walked her through what they needed from the gift drive. From there, she reached out to people both within and outside of the Hockaday community for donations. Dewar also had to sort the gifts before delivering them to The Family Place.
“It was awesome to see kids during the holidays who might not typically get toys getting excited about all the dolls and stuff,” Dewar said.
The second piece of her project aimed to help Hope Supply as well. After brainstorming with employees, she decided to help renovate a secondary location of Hope Supply which was facing a shortage of volunteers.
“I wanted to make that warehouse more of a comfortable place for those families to shop and go through there and pick out what clothes they need,” Dewar said. “So I kind of wanted to make that place more warm. It was a pretty empty and cold warehouse before.”
To brighten the space, Dewar recruited a group of her friends to help her paint a mural on one of the walls inside the warehouse. After making an initial trip to see the warehouse and begin planning, they painted the wall a shade of yellow, but then ran into a few complications.
“Her original idea for the mural was to use cutouts and spray paint inside of the cutouts on the wall,” Lowry said. “But the stencils were not as crisp as we wanted to so we had to sort of change our plans half way through and paint by hand.”
Battling for several hours through inclement weather and having to make design changes on the fly, the group managed to complete the mural. The finished project included the Hope Supply logo, the company’s name and a variety of inspirational messages.
“The most rewarding part was probably knowing that it was just going to look nice and be a nice symbol of attraction in the warehouse,” Dedman said.
Lowry agreed with her classmate that the mural was worth the time and effort it required.
“The most rewarding part for me would probably be seeing the mural finished once we had completed the painting because it definitely added personality to what would otherwise have been a blank space,” Lowry said. “It was really nice to see the finished product and how it transformed the place.”
