In November 2021, the Corridor Community Action Network (CCAN) launched its Clothing Cruise, an RV that served as a mobile clothing pantry distributing donated clothing for free to those in need.
“We had a lot of people that were talking about needing just regular school clothing and work clothing and items like that,” Mandi Remington, CCAN’s director, told Little Village at the time. “After talking to other organizations, after having people ask about clothing, we realized there really was a big unmet need for that in the corridor.”
Over the past two and a half years, the Clothing Cruise grew beyond just helping people get needed clothing, and also supplied the community with “health supplies, toiletries, menstrual supplies, sexual health supplies, harm reduction supplies, energy saving kits from Green Iowa Americorps and resources from other local groups such as Table to Table and the Iowa City Human Rights Coalition,” the Iowa City-based nonprofit explained in a statement.
But all of that is now indefinitely on hold because the Clothing Cruise’s RV was destroyed in fire, CCAN said in a news release on Wednesday.
“This is devastating,” Remington told Little Village on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s a huge loss.”
The RV had been parked on S Clinton Street behind Iowa City Fab Lab, which is a key CCAN sponsor. Remington learned about the fire when an Iowa City Police Department officer came to her door at 4 a.m. on Monday morning.
“He said it had burned and nothing was salvageable,” Remington recalled. “They wanted to make sure that no one had been living in it.”
No one was occupying the RV.
“We had a volunteer sorting clothes on Saturday afternoon,” Remington said. “That was the last time anybody should have been in it.”
All the clothing onboard the RV was destroyed in the fire.
The officer told Remington the Iowa City Fire Department would be conducting an investigation into the cause of the fire, and would likely be in touch.
“I never heard from the fire department, so I ended up calling them myself,” Remington said. “[On Tuesday] they told me that it was too far gone for them to be able to find any forensic evidence to determine whether it was intentional or accidental.”
“They said that if we wanted we could call the police department and ask if there were any cameras focused on the parking lot. At this point that’s not something we have done.”
As CCAN begins the process of recovering from the fire, its most immediate needs are cleaning supplies and money.
“Right now we just need to focus on getting that parking lot cleaned up, and then trying to get a new vehicle,” Remington said. “We need trash bags, gloves, wipes and other cleaning items, and dust masks.”
But the most useful form of support at the moment is financial. It will give CCAN the flexibility to get the exact supplies it needs, and help the nonprofit start on replacing what was lost.
Anyone interested in making a donation can do so through Paypal, Venmo and Cash App, or being mailing a check to:
Corridor Community Action Network
c/o Iowa City Fab Lab
870 S Capitol St
Iowa City, IA 52245
One thing CCAN does not need at the moment is donations of clothing, because it doesn’t have space to store them. Remington said CCAN will send out a news release when it’s ready to start accepting donations of clothing again.
At the moment, CCAN’s attention is focused on cleaning up the damage left behind by the fire, and working to replace the RV.
“It’s going to take a lot of work to come back from this,” Remington said. “We’re really going to need a lot of support.”
