It’s hard to believe that our annual Holiday Toy Drive continues to get bigger and better each year, but we keep finding a way to make a bigger impact in our community during the holiday season! We continued our trend this year and distributed about 1,500 toys to families in our county across two events.
Our first event was held on December 17 and was exclusively for families who submitted requests using our online form. We received almost 300 requests within the first 48 hours of opening our form. As a result, we had to close it soon after over concerns of being unable to meet everyone’s requests. During this event, we provided 3 toys per child for our families, totaling about 700 toys in total.
After receiving even more donations of toys and seeing that we still had more toys to distribute, we decided to hold a second event on the morning of 12/24 that would be open to the general public. We opened the doors to Reese’s House at 9 am and distributed about 800 additional toys (3 per kid again) within 90 minutes until we were out of toys!
Distributing 1,500 toys to families in our county was an absolute blessing! By providing 3 toys per kid, we were able to ensure that 500 kids had some extra holiday cheer this year!
On behalf of our families and our organization, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who made this happen! We raised $2,250, which was a record for us, to purchase toys for our families. We had countless families that were sponsored by kind-hearted community members who shopped and filled their requests. We continued to partner with local businesses, Wildflower Vegan Cafe and Colonial Florist and Gifts, who helped spread the word to encourage toy donations and opened up their businesses to serve as a toy drop-off center. The Cumberland County Clerk’s Office also ran an incentive program that allowed them to collect many toys for us. We had countless volunteers from the community and from Positive Vibe Community Group who helped walk our families around to select toys that met their needs.
There is so much work and dedication required to make two events like this happen and we are so grateful that we were able to continue helping our community. We are in talks with some other organizations to make this even bigger and better next year, so make sure you stay tuned! Thanks again and Happy Holidays everyone!