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Gown donation is helping Hearts in Motion Charity
-Posted: Mar 18 2021
Grace Jania, left Karen Jania and Allie Holleman go through and try on prom dresses. Hearts in Motion, is a nonprofit organization, with a mission to empower volunteers to positively impact the lives of people in need. A fundraising for the organization is going on at the Dunhill Formal Wear in Merrillville. Grace Jania and Allie Holleman spent Saturday trying on dresses at Dunhill Formal Wear in Merrillville for the Illiana Christian High School prom. Shopping for the event was a little bit of normal after a year where most school functions were canceled due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19.Karen Scheeringa-Parra, Executive
Director of Hearts in Motion, left, helps Grace Jania, 16, right, go thorough prom dresses at Dunhill Formal Wear in Merrillville, In. Thousands of donated brand new prom and wedding dresses are on sale for as little as $50. “It’s really exciting. We didn’t get to have a whole lot of dances last year,” Jania, of St. John, said. The pair were busy browsing through the hundreds of dresses at the store trying to find one that looked and it just right. “It’s awesome It’s good to be trying something on,” Holleman, of Beecher, Illinois, said.
There were plenty of gowns to choose from at the sale benefiting Hearts in Motion, a Schererville-based nonprofit. Karen Scheeringa-Parra, the organization’s founder, said they recently received a donation of 3,000 prom dresses, quinceanera gowns, mother-of-the-bride dresses and wedding gowns they will be selling with all proceeds going directly to HIM. All of the gowns are new or samples.
Angelo Liakos, right, peeks around a large assortment of wedding dresses as his mom Lisa Gover picks through them. Dan Zandstra, who owns Dunhill, opened the shop to Hearts in Motion to facilitate the sale, she said. The sale continues daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Saturday. She described the event as a community effort. Her niece, Laura Scheeringa from Lowell, Michigan, was modeling different dresses to passing motorists on Broadway in front of the store. “I’m hoping to try and help bring people in,” Scheeringa said.
Courtney Fox, right, of DeMotte, gets the opinion of mom, Kristi Fox, left, and boyfriend Alex Dimeglio as she tries on dresses. Scheeringa-Parra said the dresses are all being sold at $50 each regardless of the original price and the wedding gowns
are selling at $100. The donation came from a friend who decided to close her Orland Park, Illinois-based bridal shop with the intention of benefiting the charity. “She has been to Guatemala and loved, loved, loved what we do and decided she wanted to help,” Scheeringa-Parra said. Hearts in Motion operates an orphanage in Guatemala, where it also brings medical care and surgical treatment to the country’s youngsters who otherwise would not have access to the care needed. It also provides a variety of community service efforts in Northwest Indiana.
Since many proms have again been canceled, she said some people are hosting parent parties for their teens. Offering the gowns as such a deeply discounted price benefits the charity but also helps the teen who have been impacted by the pandemic and are looking for a release.
Allie Holleman, left, gets some help from Karen Jania, right, as she tries on a prom dress. A handful of brides have also made their way through the business to look for a gown. Scheeringa-Parra said one 
such bride came in alone as her mother had died. She and the HIM volunteers were able to share the day with the woman and help it be a more fun experience. Clients from TradeWinds were the sale’s first customers. Scheeringa-Parra said before the sale was opened to the public, dozens of special needs clients were able to shop for a dress to their annual dance at no charge. “We ended up fitting all of the girls for free,” she said.
Along with its mission work in Guatemala, Hearts in Motion also works with Northwest Indiana homeless and women’s shelters through HIM’s Schererville resale shop. Women who escape abusive situations with just the clothes on their backs are given vouchers for the resale shop where they can get clothes and things they need for free. Scheeringa-Parra said the organization also helps people transitioning from homeless shelters to a permanent residence by supplying everything they need to get started, such as furniture and kitchen supplies. HIM is always seeking donations of furniture to help with the effort, she said.
“We totally live by donations,” Scheeringa-Parra said. Funds raised through the dress sale will assist with all of Hearts In Motion’s outreach efforts. “Every dress here may be putting a child through school.” The dresses also will help the residents of the orphanage, who must have a job when they turn 18. Scheeringa-Parra said they will be shipping some of the quinceanera gowns will be shipped to the orphanage, where they plan to create a store where the dresses are rented to local girls. Most girls in Guatemala rent gowns for their quinceaneras because they cannot afford to purchase it. The girls from the orphanage will be able to work in the store to learn skills and meet the requirement.
Friends Norma Arauz and Lisa Govea, both of Valparaiso, were browsing the racks of dresses. Arauz was looking for a bridesmaid dress, Govea was looking for fun and to provide moral support. The price was right, but more importantly, buying dress is a way to help out. “This is such a great opportunity,” Govea said. Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
From New Chicago to Lebanon and beyond, Hearts in Motion fills needs
-Posted: Nov 25 2020
- Jacob Cross Times correspondent
When the holidays arrive, one might wonder how they can bring positive change to their community, let alone the world.
The story of one empowered organization headquartered in Schererville proves a major contribution can start by helping one person.
“It was nothing incredible. It was totally by accident. … We’ve been blessed like crazy,” said Karen Scheeringa-Parra, executive director and founder of Hearts in Motion, a humanitarian aid organization serving the Region and beyond. 
When Scheeringa-Parra adopted a young girl from Korea in 1982, she met a woman who helped sick children from around the world receive needed medical care.
“She really inspired me. I thought, ‘That was awesome. ... I can do that,’ Scheeringa-Parra said.
She began her own efforts to help children with a girl in Guatemala whom she brought to the U.S. for surgery to repair a bilateral cleft lip and palate.
“I was just doing this as a volunteer, and the Rotary (Club) here in the area helped me pay for the tickets for myself and the little girl,” she said.
Later, she found herself taking medical teams to countries in need. By 1990, she founded Hearts in Motion, later achieving nonprofit status.
“Now I’m doing 33 trips a year to different countries, primarily Central and South America,” she said.
Local focus
In the same way that the Rotary Club helped her reach the Guatemalan girl, Scheeringa-Parra works with other local agencies and nonprofits to carry out the Hearts in Motion mission.
“My biggest satisfaction I think is the relationships that I have in the community and people that are doing good things for other people,” she said. “I know a ton of people that want to help, and they all have a specialty.”
Hearts in Motion is helping families in Lebanon after a bombing devastated the capital of Beirut in August. Hearts in Motion sent a container of furniture, food and clothes in cooperation with local thrift stores.
Indianapolis-based Pack Away Hunger, donated 20,000 meals to the Lebanon relief efforts.
Hearts in Motion touches lives around the world, but also in its own backyard.
Bill Timmer, chief of the Highland Fire Department, contacted Scheeringa-Parra after a family from New Chicago lost everything in a trailer fire.
As part of its New Directions program, Hearts in Motion furnished the home the family moved to, even finding volunteers to install furniture and other items.
New Directions links Hearts in Motion to 25 other agencies across Northwest Indiana, including shelters for women and the homeless and fire departments.
Agency representatives bring clients to the Hearts in Motion thrift store at 2210 U.S. Hwy. 41 in Schereville to pick out what they need at no cost.
New Directions
Senior centers will also be receiving gifts this holiday season. Men’s and women’s socks, reading glasses, tea cups, small throw blankets and anything useful in a nursing home would be welcomed, Scheeringa-Parra said.
Donors are invited to bring these items, as well as toys for kids from birth to 17, to the Hearts in Motion thrift store.
“It’s great. A lot of donations are coming in. We just have to keep the word going that we are still here, that we’re alive, and we still need your help,” said Deputy Director Julie Stevens.
Full circle
Stevens has a unique place at Hearts in Motion. She is the girl Scheeringa-Parra adopted from Korea from 1982. Now deputy director, Scheeringa-Parra said Stevens is in position to run the organization.
“(Julie) was my inspiration,” Scheeringa-Parra said, adding that her 11 other children also have a part to play with Hearts in Motion.
“It’s going to be some big footsteps to follow in. She is a visionary, and she has made this organization just grow so tremendously,” Stevens said of her mother.
Stevens said for her, her sisters and brothers, growing up with Hearts in Motion was the norm, making it hard to imagine doing anything else.
“It was a big adventure and a lot of fun,” Stevens said.
Stevens oversees many humanitarian programs, particularly international programs in Guatemala, where Hearts in Motion operates five schools as well as a 17-acre campus with an orphanage and nutrition center.
Stevens said weekly feeding initiatives are planned this holiday season at the nutrition center, where families can receive food baskets. This is part of Hearts in Motion 's effort to ensure sponsored children get food on the table this holiday season.
Children also will receive Christmas gifts from U.S. donors and sponsors as usual, Stevens said.
Sponsorships, available online at www.heartsinmotion.org/him-Sponsorship Programs-220.htm — provide a sponsored child an education, meals and/or health care.
Stevens said purchasing a sponsorship makes a great gift for the holidays for that someone who has everything.
“I’m excited for where it’s going and what I can do to help make it grow and just continue for many years,” Stevens said.
To help or for more information, visit www.heartsinmotion.org.
Washington State Magazine Fall 2019
-Posted: Sep 02 2019
by Latisha Jensen ’19
Joselín Hicho received the call the night of March 12. Her 21-month-old son, César Vicente, had been added to the next day’s schedule for volunteer surgeons to operate on his cleft lip. The next morning, they hopped on the 5:00 a.m. bus from their town of San Sebastian for the two-hour journey to a private hospital in Zacapa, Guatemala. The humanitarian organization Hearts in Motion (HIM) has
been sending surgeons to perform life-changing surgeries on Guatemalans for about 35 years. Cleft lip and palate, which can lead to malnutrition, are common operations in the area. Hicho says she’s happy her child will have una vida normal, a normal life. Volunteer doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals perform cleft palate repair and other surgeries. (Photo Matt Winchell) Lars Neuenschwander, one of 35 Washington State University students on this year’s spring break volunteer trip with HIM, witnessed surgeries such as Vicente’s, and his dream to provide free medical services to less fortunate individuals around the world solidified into a concrete goal. “I had realized that I spent a lot of time engineering things that help people, but never really got an opportunity to work with those people,” says Neuenschwander, who just graduated with bachelor’s degrees in bioengineering and Spanish. “[Hearts in Motion] was the perfect combination.” For 12 years, students, primarily health sciences and Spanish majors, have traveled to Guatemala with HIM offering assistance to dentists, surgeons, and other specialists. They were assigned a new duty each day, such as checking people in, measuring height and weight, or drawing blood. They also tested people for anemia and diabetes, assisted in tooth extractions, distributed and gave instructions on pain pills, helped with speech and physical therapy, and constructed homes. The students all had varying levels of Spanish skills, and Neuenschwander says being a “runner” to direct people at the clinics required the most diverse set of Spanish words.
If patients had anemia or diabetes, runners would explain that, if diabetic, they needed to drink less soda and eat fewer sugary foods. If anemic, runners would send them to Ana María Rodriguez-Vivaldi, associate professor of Spanish, who would give detailed advice.
“There is nothing I can compare to being thrust into a situation where everybody around you speaks no English, and you have to communicate really refined instructions about their health,” Neuenschwander says.
Students also visited the nearby nutrition center for malnourished children, orphanage, and senior center built by the HIM program.
The seniors come in on Wednesdays, and the orphanage children serve them meals, says HIM founder Karen Scheeringa-Parra. What makes the program unique is that anyone at any age or ability can help change others’ lives, she says.
“This [program] is so broad that you can bring your grandma down and she can rock babies in the nutrition center while we go do surgery.” Scheeringa-Parra always had a heart for helping others and went to school to be a social worker. Her journey to creating this nonprofit was not a smooth one.
After suffering a fifth miscarriage, she adopted a little girl from South Korea. She had no idea how this would lead her to help hundreds of other children and eleven adopted children of her own. Eventually, she was able to conceive one child. While in South Korea, she met a woman who was adopting six children with heart defects. She was doing this because the child she adopted a year prior had died due to a lack of timely medical attention. “I was so impressed when I met her. She had turned her pain into something really incredible,” Scheeringa-Parra says.
Inspired, she brought home a little girl from Guatemala in 1983 to operate on her bilateral cleft palate. The next year, she brought 27 more children. In 1990, HIM started sending university students as volunteers to make a larger impact. The program has been in Zacapa, the area with the most need, for 24 years. WSU junior Auni Edwards arrived in Zacapa as a biology major and, after interacting with Guatemalans, left with the realization that she wants to become a physician’s assistant to have more direct personal contact with patients. It was Edwards’s first study abroad experience, and she says she was shocked by how kind and grateful everyone was. “They have so little but they are still just as happy, if not happier, overall,”
Edwards says. “We were literally pulling teeth with just topical, and they were awake. They got up out of their chairs and hugged and thanked us.” Edwards traveled to Ecuador in July to test anemia rates with Kathy Beerman, professor in the School of Biological Sciences. Beerman recognized that Guatemalans might have iron deficiency because of their high-starch diets when she first started going on the trip seven years ago.
The group rode buses on dirt roads in the sweltering heat to a new village each day, set up the clinic, and spent the day offering their services, including anemia testing. About 100 people were tested in each village. This year, the average anemia rates ranged from 20 to 25 percent, up to 35 percent.
When patients test positive for anemia, they are given the Lucky Iron Fish, a fish-shaped iron piece activated in boiling water and then cooked in meals such as rice to enrich the food with iron. It lasts five years for an entire family.
HIM has retested patients in later years to see the impact, and Guatemalans have reported feeling more energetic and having an increased ability to do activities such as walking their children to school.
HIM already offers a few services in Ecuador but founder Scheeringa-Parra wants to expand even more. Beerman’s goal is to start a second HIM program in Ecuador in May 2020, if there’s enough medical need.
Edwards says the HIM excursion gives students a cultural experience they couldn’t fully grasp sitting in a classroom, and Neuenschwander agrees.
“We complain about things like not having Wi-Fi,” Neuenschwander says. “But when you compare them to the things other people in the world live with—that really provides you with perspective of how privileged you actually are.”
Loyal Native Sets "Hearts In Motion"
-Posted: Nov 14 2018
Medical care is crucial for any part of the world, but not all have easy access to it.
Jordyn Pieper of Loyal, currently a Physician Assistant student at Carroll University in Waukesha, took part in a medical mission trip to Guatemala for five days this October through Hearts in Motion, a non-profit that strives to change the lives of those living in poverty. The mission group of about 45 people was able to provide medical care to over 1,000 in the mountain villages near the city of Zacapa.
“My role during the mission trip was to be a medical provider at the pop-up clinics that we would set up each day, despite only being a student,” Pieper said. “I handed out medications, played with the children, and talked with the citizens of the villages we visited. We also had general and orthopedic surgeons from the States come down and perform surgery for free. People walked hours and stood in long lines to receive vitamins, Ibuprofen, and various other medications that we are blessed enough to get from stores in America.”
One group headed to surgery, another to the village clinics or construction sites. Those with non-medical backgrounds passed out donated toys, shoes, diapers, helped out at the clinics, and completed construction work.
Despite their poverty, the people Pieper worked with were happier and more generous than one might expect.
“It was so uplifting to see how positive the people of Guatemala are despite the circumstances,” Pieper said. “The love and respect they have for each other and others is very refreshing to see. They believe in giving so much to others even when they don’t have much for themselves.”
A memorable part of the trip was being able to help a extremely malnourished woman at the HIM nutrition center and see her good progress a few days later. Another was providing food and shelter to 75 Honduran refugees in the Hearts in Motion house, and hearing their often gut-wrenching stories. Pieper saw Guatemalans set up stations to provide food and water to the refugees, despite not having much themselves, since they knew others needed it more.
Many make a living rummaging through garbage at the Zacapa dump and collecting recyclables that can be resold in the city.
“When we went to the dump, we handed out sandwiches and rice milk to the children. As we arrived, the bus driver honked his horn, and we could see the children running to the main building because they were excited to get their share of the food. We saw many children walking around the dump trying to find useful garbage that they could sell for their families,” Pieper said.
Small fires burn worthless garbage to make room for the new. Each family is assigned a section of the dumpster to limit violence and share equally. “It was heartbreaking to see the conditions that people live in day in and day out,” she noted.
The mission trip overall was an eye-opening experience. “It did not disappoint, and I left Guatemala thankful for all the things I have,” she said. “Personally, I felt like I truly made a difference in people’s lives.”
The group provided 30 pills of Ibuprofen, vitamins, and other medications to each patient toward their symptoms. To assist with the ongoing need for supplies, Pieper is hoping to collect enough to give people more than a month’s worth of medications. Donations can be dropped off at the City Hall in Loyal. See below for a list.
“I can promise you that your donations will go directly to the people in need,” Pieper said. “I have seen firsthand that the donations that have been collected are being used for the good of the people in providing homes, food, and medical supplies.”
She plans to return to Guatemala next October with as many donations as she can bring, and depending on response may send some supplies down with another group taking the trip in July.
For more info on how to help, go to HeartsInMotion.org or email Pieper at jpieper@pio.carrollu.edu.
Firefighters unite
-Posted: Mar 16 2005
Firefighters unite
Bill Timmer, chief of the Highland Fire Department, touts Hearts in Motion for its dedication, saying that Executive Director Karen Scheeringa-Parra knows how to work with her community to make her goals a reality.
Over the years, Hearts in Motion has brought together the Highland Fire Department and Guatemalan firefighters as part of its ongoing mission to meet multiple humanitarian needs.
Through its partnership with Hearts in Motion, the Highland Fire Department has sent firefighters to Guatemala to help build a fire station and to train Guatemalan firefighters in fire suppression, CPR and rescue techniques.
Some Guatemalans also have come to Northwest Indiana, training alongside local firefighters to bring lifesaving techniques back to Guatemala.
The Highland Fire Department also sends equipment to Guatemala, ranging from hoses to a 1972 firetruck.
While these items are no longer OSHA compliant because of time limits set by the National Fire Protection Association, the Guatemalan communities are ready to put this equipment to use, Timmer said.
Timmer said they also assist the Guatemalan fire officials with fundraising so they can buy new equipment. He calls the collaboration heartwarming. He also said one can see the fruits of Scheeringa-Parra’s labor through Hearts in Motion. “She’s kind of the heart of Hearts in Motion, and she is a pretty smart lady let me tell you,” Timmer said. “She has surrounded herself with a tremendous staff that are all really good people.”
| Firefighters unite |
HEADQUARTERS
Phone: 219-924-2446
Fax: 219-922-1694
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