December was a busy month and we are still in awe of what we were able to put together for our community! Thanks to a huge deal of support, we were able to hold our 4th Annual Holiday Toy Drive…twice! To make things even better, we were able to open the doors of Reese’s House to our community for this event for the first time!
Our first event was held on Sunday, December 12th, and was open to all of our families that made a request. We received 180 individual requests from over 50 families in our community who were in need of some help this holiday season. During this event, we provided at least 3 toys for every request that was received. By the time the day was over, we handed out over 600 toys!
Even though our event went was a huge success, we had a problem. We still had extra toys! We thought long and hard about how to address this problem until our executive director Sean had a brilliant idea. He wanted to host another event the following weekend and open it up to the public. While we knew it would be more work, how could we say no?!
Fast forward a week and we were ready to open our doors to the public for another toy drive, but this time on the morning of Christmas Eve. Despite the frigid temperatures in the teens, we were able to meet the needs of 265 kids in our community. We offered 2 toys per kid and handed out well over 500 toys in just under 2 hours!
We would like to extend our most heartfelt thank you to our donors (both of toys and funds), family sponsors, community partners, volunteers, everyone who shared our events on social media, and our families for helping us make these days such a big success for our community. Over the two days, we set an organizational record and distributed over 1,100 toys and at least that many brand-new books as well! This was truly a community effort and we know that this is simply the tip of the iceberg for what we are going to accomplish at Reese’s House!
Happy Holidays!
