Monterey County is richly blessed with a wealth of abundance. We witness it in a most generous landscape, in endless rows of produce, thriving in a dark, rich soil. We see it in the extravagant beauty of wildflower meadows, and mountain ranges, which Steinbeck described as either light, gay, full of sun and loveliness, or dark and brooding. We discover it in a craggy coastline holding a restless cerulean sea at bay. We notice it in stately mansions rising within gated communities, in verdant courses carpeting the landscape, in the untamed coastal forest flanking the “Big Sur.”

And yet according to local nonprofit organization the Housing for Kids Fund of the Community Foundation for Monterey County, in the 2022-2023 school year, more than 11,734 school-aged students in Monterey County qualified as homeless.

“In a broader definition, these are kids whose families are living in hotels and motels, in shelters, in vehicles not designed for habitation, on the street, or doubled and tripled up under one roof,” said Sandra Leader, a founding member of Housing for Kids. “We have learned that homelessness is the number one cause of students’ failure to graduate, and those without a high school diploma are 3.5 times more likely to experience homelessness in the future. We knew we needed to do something.”

Once another founding member, Karen Osborne, posted the homeless students’ statistic on neighborhood social networking platform “Nextdoor,” she received a spontaneous outpouring from the community — an architect, a builder, teachers, families, and other practitioners and community members wanting to help make a difference.

“It took us a year and a half to come together, to do our research, and find our niche, which is rental assistance,” Leader said. “Our initial impulse was to work toward building affordable housing, since that’s the main issue here. There is not enough. When people are working two and three jobs to put food on the table, if there is an increase in rent or an interruption in income, they’re out on the street. People need help now.”

To help fund their efforts, this weekend and through the end of June, Housing for Kids, in partnership with the Center for Spiritual Awakening — several of whose members have offered support — is hosting a charity estate sale on behalf of both organizations, adjacent The Crossroads Carmel at 2611 Carmel Center Place, the “blue roof office buildings” behind Wells Fargo. Funds will support the Housing for Kids rental assistance program.

While the charity estate sale has been supported by a range of local donors, the majority of the wide offering of items for sale was donated by Glenn and Cheryl Hickerson who, after selling their home in Sonoma and moving to Carmel in February, donated their estate to the sale.

“Among a huge amount of mementos, artifacts, and other items of value, we know there are people in this community who would know the provenance of this collection,” Cheryl Hickerson said.

“To have moved from a larger home into a smaller home and then used our estate as the centerpiece of this sale to help provide housing for members of this community really is the crux of it. We are thrilled to be able to help in this way.”

Having previously been a resident of this community for 25 years, it means a lot to Hickerson to have an opportunity to benefit local organizations, particularly on behalf of the needs of children.

“This is goodwill in action,” she said.

In addition to the largesse of the Hickerson estate, Housing for Kids received more than a dozen artisanal teapots from the extensive collection of the late Susie Franklin, founder of the Franklin Legacy Fund.

Established to focus financial support and efforts on mitigating child and youth homelessness, the Fund continues under the direction of Executive Director Sandra Leader.

Susie Franklin’s husband, Charly Franklin, has contributed select collectible teapots to the estate sale, said Leader, some of which were handcrafted and signed by Paul Cardew, the British artist world renowned for his rare, limited-edition teapots, as well as “Husby Pottery,” collectible handcrafted salt-fired porcelain pieces by Cheryl and Bob Husby out of Minnesota, and teapots by renowned Van Briggle pottery, first released in 1901.

“The mission of the Franklin Fund aligns with the goals of Housing for Kids,” said Leader, “to find and implement sustainable solutions to housing insecurity, by lowering the number of students without homes in Monterey County public schools, and raising public awareness about the root causes of this crisis, and support those in the field already serving this population.”