When the pandemic limited what her eighth grade confirmation students could do for a service project, St. John Brebeuf School teacher Rebecca Giannelli challenged them to find a project they could do inside.

One of her students, Kate Quintero, found a project on the Chicago Cares website that showed how to make mats for people experiencing homelessness out of plastic shopping bags.

The idea resonated with the students, several of whom attended a leadership day at the Illinois Holocaust Museum last year and learned that by 2050, it is expected that there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. The students embraced the project and it has been going strong since October, with school and parish families donating bags.

“They wanted to do something that would help the environment as well as help the community, because I always implore them to be the hands and feet of Jesus. That’s their job as citizens of the world,” Giannelli.

At first, the students started making yarn balls out of the bags to give to Chicago Cares for its own mat-making projects. Soon the school’s maintenance person connected Giannelli and her students with Jim Berger, a volunteer with the parish’s Uncle Pete’s Ministry, which distributes bagged lunches to homeless people on the city’s West Side.

Just before the pandemic, Berger started making mats for the homeless out of plastic bags by weaving them on a loom. He offered to build looms for the students so they could make their own mats.

Initially, he built smaller, quarter-sized frames for the students because Giannelli thought they would be easier for the students to use. They later upgraded to two full-sized looms, which Berger also built. The students held a fundraiser to help defray some of the cost for Berger’s materials.

Berger has since built looms for two other Catholic schools — St. Viator and Mary, Seat of Wisdom — and one Greek Orthodox church.

The students’ undertaking has left an impression on Berger.

“I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “They have so much energy and so much enthusiasm to do these projects. I think it’s amazing.”

Giannelli said the students have worked on the mats once a week since October.

“Now we’ve made seven mats and our goal is 15,” she said. “And we’re now making pillows as well.”.

Students use bag scraps to stuff pillows, so it is a no-waste project. It takes 500 bags to make one mat and approximately 150 to 200 bags to make a pillow.

Students work on various parts of the process, from cutting the bags down to size, to making strands of plastic yarn by tying the pieces together, to weaving the yarn and finishing off the edges.

Uncle Pete’s Ministry distributes the mats and pillows once they are finished.

The students have become so adept at weaving the bags that they include patterns in the mats and even know which bags from certain stores make the best yarn.

“These kids have totally embraced it,” Giannelli said. “It started as their passion project and just exploded in their confirmation project and went above and beyond any expectation I ever had for it.”

The eighth graders, who graduate this year, have also enlisted the help of sixth and seventh grade students so that the project can continue on for years to come.

“We had it be eighth grade for just a little while and then all of the middle school is doing it now so we get to grow throughout the middle school,” said eighth grader Isabella Allison.

 “It shows that we can make a difference even though we’re a small school,” said eighth grader Alyssa Jao. “It’s something that we can do with COVID around still.”

“And once you get the hang of it [the weaving] it’s pretty easy,” Allison said.

Eighth grader Kate Quintero, who pitched the project to her classmates, said she and the other students have learned a lot through the project.

“It makes me really happy because it really helps us realize how easy it is to help people,” Quintero said. “It’s great for the environment and it’s great for the people who need the mats.”