Several feet from the fuschia front door of Hillsdale Beauty College, there sits a wooden cabinet with two glass doors. Its shelves brim with packaged food: a bag of rice, a can of beef stew, a box of mac ’n’ cheese — and clothing and hygiene items — a pair of gray sneakers, tubes of toothpaste.
Last week the Hillsdale Blessing Box held a variety of essentials, free gifts to Hillsdale residents in need. On Tuesday, it was emptied.
Krista Roth, who put up the Blessing Box early this month, said the box brings positivity to the community, but this week, its donations were abused.
“Anybody taking what they need please still utilize the box for your needs, but the ones that are taking car loads, please be considerate to those that really need these items. This wasn’t put up to supply your house weekly, this was put up to help those make ends meet until they can get money to get what they need,” Roth posted in Hillsdale’s Blessing Boxes Facebook group. “This is a positive thing for our community to come together.”
Roth and her fiance, Quae Proctor, decided to put up a Blessing Box to help people in the community through hard times, the way they had been helped just over a year ago.
While Roth was pregnant and struggling to keep food in the house for her other children, her family helped her and Proctor through their financial struggle.
“Now we’re in a more positive place in our lives, and we want to turn our bad karma into good karma,” Roth said.
Blessing Boxes have been popping up across the U.S. for more than a year now, but they’ve just recently made their way toward Hillsdale County. One appeared in Coldwater this January after city residents Daryl and Katie Bontrager put it up in a neighborhood. The makeshift cabinets hold nonperishable food and household items, donations from the community for the community.
Before she heard about the boxes, Roth had been passing out baby care packages for single or struggling parents. But after she heard about the trend, she decided to create a box of her own.
“I told Quae, ‘I want to do something bigger,’” she said.
She reached out to Katie Bontrager, who supplied the box itself. And as she began to share about the project, Zetave Young, owner of Hillsdale Beauty College, got word and offered her property for the first location.
“We want to help the community,” Young said. “I think it’s a fantastic idea.”
After it was put up, Young said she noticed the box emptying quickly, which told her it was serving a purpose.
“There must be a desperate need for it because I notice Krista does a great job filling it daily. And a lot of times by the time we close school I see her restocking, and by the time I get here in the morning it’s pretty much empty,” Young said. “So I hope the donations keep coming in so she can keep filling it and hopefully the community keeps chipping in.”
Young said someone came in to the beauty college once and said the box was a bad idea, that people would just take advantage of it. But Young and others at the school disagreed.
“If anybody did say something negative, we would say something positive,” Young said.
But what about the alleged truckload bandits?
Roth said she’ll stock the box with minimal supplies for now. She’ll be keeping an eye on the box, and she asked others to do the same. But if anyone is in need, she said she’d be more than happy to deliver items herself.
“I think it’s a positive thing for the community,” Roth said. “There’s so much hate in the world right now. We need more positivity and less greed. And it kind of brings the community together.”
She’s not planning on halting the project; she’s working on setting up a new box in Hanover now. And others are following her lead.
Bree Bennett, known as The Hillsdale Supergirl, had planned to put up a Blessing Box even before the first one appeared in Hillsdale. She has an idea for a second location.
“I believe the project is a great idea, if it’s placed where it’s needed,” Bennett said. “I have been trying to make another one, and make one specifically for water and crackers — foods that are okay on really hot days — for the beginning and end of Baw Beese trail, but I shall cross that bridge when I come to it!”
The handwritten nameplate on the side of the blessing box, Hillsdale’s Blessing Boxes, echoes this energy — by leaving hope for more to come.
