A couple of months ago my friend Allison Johnson and I started our organization titled “Holiday Hope” and our goal is to bring holiday hope to children and families who may be going through difficult circumstances.
At Carondelet High School, every year we host a St. Marty’s Party (Halloween Party) for kids. We typically decorate the school and kids come through the decorated halls to trick-or-treat and play fun games. Due to Covid-19, we could not do it this year so we decided to create donation drives to still bring holiday hope to kids and families in need!
Our first donation drive was for Halloween to collect candy for kids at the Ronald McDonald Charity in Palo Alto and for the Bay Area Crisis Nursery in Concord. We collected over 300 pounds of candy!
For this Christmas toy drive, we decided to donate all of the toys to the Bay Area Crisis Nursery because we both had wrapped Christmas gifts there with our Girl Scout Troops in elementary school. We held two toy drives (December 6th and 13th). We were both overwhelmed by the generosity of the community, and with their help we collected 700+ toys! We have given the toys to the Bay Area Crisis Nursery and Kimberly Baptista, Development Director, said, “We can always use toys and books, and can assure they will go to good use to children in need 🙂 Thank you for organizing this, as so many more kids need holiday hope because of Covid-19!”
Our Instagram: _holidayhope
Our Website: https://sites.google.com/view/holidayhope/home
By Isabella Hanck, Junior at Carondelet High School, Resident since 2008
Note from the Content Coordinator:
In this “Acts of Kindness” column I invite you to share your stories. Tell us about what you or your neighbors are doing to spread kindness. I hope this will inspire us all to make the world a little nicer. Please send stories and photos to knavolio@bestversionmedia.com.