(bright music) - Mujeres Unidas de Utah is a Latina-led nonprofit that advocates, empowers, informs and supports the underserved Latina population in Utah.

Here to tell us more about their upcoming coat drive is Director Belia Paz.

Hi Belia, thanks so much for being here.

So you are the founder of this like, for the last five years, you've been helping.

- Yeah, I've actually started in Idaho.

For 25 years it was Mujeres Unidas de Idaho.

- Okay.

- Which means united women.

- Yeah.

- That's what mujeres unidas stands for.

- Okay, great, great.

So you do workshops, you do all sorts of things.

- Every single month we're helping about 300 women.

We provide them food boxes.

We provide them a nice hot dinner.

We provide them a workshop, which is either empowering.

There's different workshops every single month.

On top, when they leave, they take a clothing, a hygiene kit and a makeup kit.

- So that's what we do - All right.

- every single month.

But now we're getting ready for our big family giveaway.

- Oh yeah, the big family event.

And it's a coat drive.

So you need how many coats?

- I need at least a thousand more coats.

- Wow.

- Yeah, and why do we need so many coats?

You know, we've been doing this for five years.

Abrigando vidas means coating lives, coating kids' lives, keeping them warm.

Abrigo is a coat, so abrigando means it's coating them.

So we provide blankets for the families.

We provide coats, mittens, hats and even clothing if we have that warm clothing and sweaters.

Anything warm for them.

We deal with a lot of families that are crossing over the border that right now, are out homeless, so we need to make sure they're warm.

But as well, besides doing the coats and blankets, we as well provide them a food box.

So and that is the event that we have coming up.

- That's great.

- That we're so excited about.

- And the big event where you distribute everything, November 18th, and where is that?

- Rose Park Elementary.

That's where we do it.

And we've been doing it for five years already.

- [Mary] Oh, great.

- So last year we were short those thousand.

- Well, we're gonna help you get more.

- Thank you.

- All right.

- Thank you for being here, Belia.

And thank you so much for what you do, thanks.

- Thank you so much.

- And if you'd like to know more about how you can donate and help the Mujeres Unidas de Utah, it's Abrigando Vidas, November 18th from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM at Rose Park Elementary School is where everything will be distributed.

To find out where you can drop things off and how it works, go to mujeresunidasutah.org.

That's mujeresunidasutah.org.

I'm Mary Dickson, thanks for watching "Contact".

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