Windy City Warmth Information

James Van Drie founded Windy City Warmth in his freshman year of college (2017-2018), but the idea to start this organization began in high school when James distributed food to people experiencing homelessness with some classmates. Most of the people he spoke to expressed a desperate need for better winter weather gear. Knowing his school had plenty of nice coats and jackets in its lost and found, he determined to distribute that gear to the homeless. It was during James' freshman year at Wheaton College when he planned the first volunteer distribution day with a group of students from his old high school. After that day, James started pulling together a team and completing the necessary legal documents to make Windy City Warmth into a 501c3 nonprofit. Over the next year, James met with dozens of people from across Chicago, ranging from business owners to employees at homeless shelters to people experiencing homelessness themselves, and he realized that Windy City Warmth's mission needed to include training our team and our volunteers to recognize the causes of housing insecurity and homelessness so that we can better respond to them. We still distribute winter weather gear, but our goals have expanded to focus on building informed relationships with the people we meet while volunteering.