An Austrian classroom provided the setting for a quiet encounter that now anchors a decade of volunteer work. A child living with anxiety held a small knitted tube — open at both ends and sized for two hands — and the moment became the emotional center of Ursula Kermer's project, Mehr ist Mehr ("More is More").
Kermer, an art therapist, leads a volunteer network that collects individually made yarn squares and assembles them into blankets, boleros, and twiddle muffs. The finished items go to people navigating difficult periods of life, including families whose children have cancer, individuals unable to cover their heating bills, and rehabilitation centers.
Kermer is direct about the limits of the effort. "Our project does not solve problems; it does not make crisis go away," she said, according to DailyGood. What the project offers instead is reliability: weekly knitting circles, the patient work of fitting mismatched squares together, and packages of wool that arrive without warning from strangers.
That steadiness carries into how the blankets are distributed. At rehabilitation centers, a counselor drapes them over chairs so that a person in crisis can reach out and select one without needing to ask. Most volunteers never learn who receives their work. Kermer photographs each stage of the process so contributors can see where their squares end up, even though the recipients remain anonymous.
Kermer frames the endeavor as a lesson in resilience without ever calling it that. Participants select a color, place trust in a process, and observe how disparate pieces are joined into a single finished object. For Kermer, the governing image is a network — "growing and moving, and provides a resilient safety" — easy to overlook yet no weaker than the separate strands that make up spools of yarn.
The project's name, Mehr ist Mehr, suggests that abundance — of hands, of squares, of small acts — has value in itself. For local readers, the model raises a question worth considering: whether similar networks of makers could serve neighbors moving through hard seasons close to home.
