On any given night, hundreds of thousands of Americans — perhaps even a million or more — go to sleep without a home. Whether they’re on the street, in an emergency shelter, in transitional housing or sleeping on a relative’s couch, they don’t have a place to call their own. Sadly, that reality isn’t going away anytime soon. 

But for those without a home, even the simple feeling of dignity that comes from being able to brush your teeth or lather yourself up with a bar of soap can help to trigger a life change. That’s been Jazna Stannard’s motivation for almost a decade.

She first got involved with helping the homeless as a freshman at Hanover High School in Massachusetts. Her mother had been collecting toiletries for a local homeless shelter and suggested Stannard do the same with her student council.

At first, Stannard thought of it as a one-time service project, calling it the Soap and Towel Drive. But a funny thing happened — she never stopped.

Once she saw the impact her efforts could have, particularly through the reach of such organizations as the Father Bill’s & MainSpring homeless shelters in Massachusetts, Stannard was all in.

“It just kept growing every year,” Stannard says. “The first year, we collected 400 items. And I thought, ‘Wow, we can do so much better. We can have drop boxes all over our town, we can reach out to other towns.’ We did it through our student council, so then I decided, ‘Let’s reach out to other student councils.’ By my junior year of high school, we’d reached out to every student council in the entire state, and then senior year we started reaching out to student councils across the country.”

When Stannard came to Purdue, she started out in engineering, then took a year off when she decided that wasn’t for her. She soon remembered what her real passion was, and she returned to Purdue to study international relations and nonprofit work — with a renewed focus on her service campaign.

When Stannard returned to Purdue, she joined the school’s business fraternity, Alpha Kappa Psi, which she calls “one of the best decisions of my college career.” She became the fraternity’s service chair, pitched her idea — and within two weeks, 30 universities were on board.

Now, more than 100 colleges in more than 30 states have become a part of the campaign, which underwent a name change when it was accepted into the Clinton Global Initiative University last Christmas Eve.

“Part of our commitment to action for them was rebranding,” Stannard explained. “So we rebranded to A Fresh Start, which sounded a whole lot better.”

This March, the group presented at the Clinton Global Initiative University in Miami, and Stannard has had the chance to meet with former President Clinton twice.

One of the other perks of attending was the chance to bond with other like-minded people. There were 20 groups there focused on homelessness and poverty alleviation — so Stannard seized the opportunity.

“We decided to just work together with 20 other initiatives,” she says. “And all these other groups were completely shocked. I was like, ‘We all want to end homelessness — we should work together.’

“One girl collected socks — hers was Knock Knock, Give A Sock. She would go around from dorm room to dorm room, and at the end of one evening she had 300 pairs of socks. She’s like, ‘Wow, I could actually do this.’ So then she spread to five other universities doing the same thing. Another girl collected feminine products and beauty products for homeless women. Another guy is literally creating sleeping bags that are reusable; you can wash them out every day. It’s amazing.”

Stannard plans to continue with A Fresh Start after graduating in December, but she’s not looking to make a full-time job of it — for herself or anyone else.

“We’ve actually never taken in a dollar for A Fresh Start that we’ve given to anyone that works for A Fresh Start,” she says. “We’ve only ever put it back into buying more products to give to shelters, or just donating it straight to the shelter if they’re like, ‘We have enough toiletries; we just need money right now.’”

Instead, Stannard will look to make a difference in some other way. She says her study of international relations is constantly making her aware of the different atrocities in the world, and “I really just want to get out there and help.”