Project Santa Claus

In a small town, as opposed to the big city, the homeless community is still prevalent; even if it is “kept quiet.” You don’t see these types of people walking down the street, as you would and as I have come to see, living in a big city like Seattle. In Seattle, there are programs that try and help the homeless community and people in need, but it is not enough. As I have come to learn working with community engagement throughout high school and into college, I have learned that the programs are still growing in both atmospheres.

Around the holidays, parents always wonder what they are going to do in order to provide for their children especially during Christmas. During Christmas in my small town, there is a program called “Project Santa Claus” that provides gifts to hundreds of children and their families every year that put on by a local community engagement group. This program allows families that are low income to sign up at the local food closet around the holiday, and if approved they are added to Santa’s list to get gifts on Christmas. The program reaches out into the community and asks people to donate gifts that are on the list for the children at multiple drop spots in local businesses around the town. The gifts are then wrapped by at least 50 volunteers from the community and sorted among all of the children based on what they asked for from Santa that year. If the project was able to get the gift, the child gets the gift.

After all of the preparations that take place in “Santa’s Workshop” (a warehouse type building) the presents are all wrapped in bags and the parents are informed to pick up the gifts on a specific day, shortly before Christmas. I had the pleasure of being invited to be present during the distribution day. This is the day when all of the parents/families come to the “workshop” and pick up all of the gifts that are in bags that they hopefully asked for. It was an amazing experience. Some families try to not make it a big deal that they are having to ask for help around the holidays because they probably wish they could do it for themselves, but at the same time, there are families that are extremely grateful and shed tears as they thank all of us for the work that everyone has put into the project in order to be such a success and a blessing for them and others that signed up for the program.

Small towns are more efficient when it comes to programs that are helping those that are low income and close to being/becoming homeless. I am glad that I have learned how to be apart of programs such as these in order to help others in the community as I have always been interested in giving back and helping out in ways for people to have the same experiences as others who don’t have such a big deal affording opportunities.