Coats for Kids celebrates 31st year

Coats for Kids is celebrating its 31st year of providing new coats throughout the Las Cruces community. The 31st annual Coats for Kids campaign raised more than $25,000 towards its goal of providing 2,000 or more new coats to children in need in 2025. The effort provided 1,450 coats for Las Cruces kids.

Coats for Kids is sponsored by the nonprofit Love Las Cruces, along with D2 Designs, Comet Cleaners and Laundry and the Knights of Columbus.

New this year was a cookie dough fundraiser, said Love Las Cruces President Alycia Jameson, who is the owner of D2 Designs and the Coats for Kids program director. Six different types of cookie dough were sold for $25 to $27 each, including bakery-style sugar butter cookies, Hershey’s chocolate chunk delights, peanut butter bliss gourmet cookies, Quaker oatmeal raisin classic cookies, M&M perfection cookies and Signature white chocolate macadamia cookies.

All the money raised through cookie-dough sales went to buy new coats in this year’s campaign.

New this year, the Coats for Kids campaign didn’t place coat collection boxes around town. That’s because the campaign did not accept gently used coats during its 2025 campaign.

“We’re focusing entirely on monetary donations, which will allow us to purchase new, high-quality coats for children in need,” Jameson said. “A $20 donation buys a new coat for a local child. The goal for this year’s campaign was to distribute as many coats as they could get funded, an equal number of coats to each Las Cruces elementary school.”

The campaign worked with social workers and counselors from Las Cruces Public Schools to ensure children most in need receive warm coats before cold weather began.

“We have distributed 3,000 coats annually for the past several years but this year we do not have the same funding and are doing our best to continue the program under our new nonprofit,” Jameson said. “To serve LCPS elementary students in need alone would be approximately 2,200 kids and we are working toward that goal. When we reach that goal, we will look at serving middle school and high school students in need (which is a few hundred more students), if that is possible. As we are able to serve students in need in Las Cruces, we can begin to help our nearby communities of Gadsden and Hatch. Donors can also directly support the Gadsden independent School District Coats for Kids fundraiser from our website.”

“We will continue to fundraise as much as possible throughout the year in 2026,” Jameson said.

Since Coats for Kids began in 1995, it has provided nearly 75,000 coats to children in need.

To make a donation to Coats for Kids of Las Cruces, visit lascrucescoatsforkids.com/donate and facebook.com/lascrucescoatsforkids.