SUAMICO, Wis. (NBC 26) — When Andrea Fanta saw someone live from the tornadoes ripping through Kentucky on her social media feed, she leaned into her network and sprung into action.
"I mean before most things, I'm a mom," Fanta, founder of the Green Bay-based Mommy AF support group said. "And so instantly I'm like, holy crap. It's right before Christmas, there's all these kids and they're not going to have presents, right? But now they also don't have their home and their blankets."
She immediately took to Facebook where she runs Facebook groups with thousands of area moms.
"Just saying 'Hey, I dont know a lot of details. I don't know exactly where we're bringing this stuff, but we're going to start collecting stuff,' and so I asked for volunteers and within 30 minutes I think we had 15 volunteers."
Ali Geohagen is one of the multiple moms who have volunteered their porch as a donation station. She said she thinks it's important to provide opportunities for people to donate all over town in a way that's convenient for them.
"My house is listed on the website, all over Facebook," Geohagen said. "I'm happy to help do that stuff and go through different things, look for expiration dates because we don't want to send them things that are expired."
While the group is still looking for vital items like baby formula and bottled water to bring to Kentucky, they are also still looking for a way to drive all of their donations there.
"If somebody or their business had a box truck or a trailer and something that we can pull it with that they're willing to offer up, we can rent it from you of course, but obviously we're doing this for free, so we hopefully don't have to spend a lot of money to be able to do this going forward," Fanta said. She's also looking for cash donations or gas cards to help her and other moms make the journey down.
The group is accepting donations through Christmas in hopes of bringing as much holiday cheer down to Kentucky as possible.
