For our ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY with Alliance for Children’s rights, we host youth aging out of foster care in a big party like THIS and THIS. In a pandemic, we needed to be covid safe, so we got together volunteers to deliver the party to 100 guests.
This year, as usual, WE COLLECTED PRACTICAL GOODS that were donated by many people far and wide who purchased from an Amazon Wish List and had these items delivered to us.
VOLUNTEERS WORKED TO PACK UP THE GOODS into foldable laundry baskets that can double to carry belongings. Many youth in foster care move around a lot and pack their personal things in trash bags so it’s great to always include a carry bag of some sort in these giftings.
My favorite! I asked friends to write PERSONAL CARDS to each recipient to just cheer them on, give positivity and uplift, and let young adults know that community is aware of them and rooting them on with these cards and any kind of policy making we can help push. Bringing awareness to the needs of those in foster care is how we can make change to a very broken system.
The company Simple Feast generously reached out to donate INDIVIDUAL BOXES OF PREPPED, HEALTHY, ORGANIC MEALS not only to our Meals for People efforts, but also to this holiday drop off. What a kind and wonderful company!!! They also gave me a box to try and it was very delicious.
Since covid prevented us from making a big turkey buffet together at Community Coalition where we typically host this annual event, our kitchen team, instead, created a HOLIDAY DINNER PLATTER FOR TWO and pumpkin cheesecake desserts for each delivery.
Then volunteers loaded everything up in vans and a bunch personal cars to CARRY OUT EACH DELIVERY.
In sum, THIS WAS A GROUP EFFORT! We received practical goods from individual donors that were packed up into baskets by volunteers, loaded up with donated Simple Feast boxes, and had volunteers personally deliver all of this to every guest. Even our dinner platters had donated turkeys from our meat vendor. If this is not the holiday spirit, then I don’t know what is! Truly, this event is always my favorite of the year and covid didn’t ruin that. Thank you to all who helped and contributed to make this event happen, there were so very many of you! Thank you for inspiring me to know that good people lean in around an organized effort and here we all worked to lean in to bring some joy to 100 young adults who have had some hard breaks.
Photos : Jacob Boll (who also volunteered, thank you, Jacob!)
