I’m planning to conspire with maybe a couple of other volunteers at my local mutual aid org to put together some end-of-year present hampers aimed towards kids.
This will be intended for children who are homeless or facing serious poverty so they can have some nice things like other kids get to have at Christmas time (I’m in a culturally Christian country so it’s the big annual gift-giving celebration here.)
Do you have any suggestions for what could be good to include?
Obviously I’m looking for lower cost items so that we can stretch our money as far as we can and I’m looking for ideas for things that are more oriented towards enjoyable gifts over giving a kid more mundane items like socks and writing pads.
My plan at the moment is to do two age brackets, with one set of hampers being aimed at a <10yo bracket and another that is >10yo, approximately.
Any hot ideas for stocking filler/secret santa style gifts for kids?
It’s a little bit tricky as the main demographic is people who are facing really significant poverty (and lots are homeless) so shit comes up for folks and sometimes they can’t get to where the mutual aid org pops up.
Another user inspired the idea of setting up a sort of gift registry, so that would entail speaking to parents/caregivers to get an idea of what the kid in question would most appreciate and then getting a present organised based on that info.
Depending on how much we can organise and how much cash we can muster, I think we’ll aim for some personalised gifts as well as some more generic gifts because I don’t want to create a structural barrier that unintentionally punishes certain kids just because their caregivers happen to be more pressed for resources that they weren’t able to line up a personalised gift, if that makes sense, because that would suck. (“Sorry kid, you don’t get a present because your parents lacked the resources to get to the mutual aid org consistently enough to line something up for you this year. Maybe next time if you want a present your parents should have enough money to afford transport to the mutual aid org each week and they shouldn’t be struggling with serious mental illness or addiction that prevents them from getting there.”)
Ah… makes sense. My brain defaulted to “you’ve got a set of regulars with kids that make it to aid point” that’d you’d be able to ask directly.
The “gift registry” mentioned in another comment reminds me of the Secret Santa and Angel Tree events that get set up locally during December. Is there anything similar where you’re at?
A family goes to a place setting up a Secret Santa/Angel Tree (sometimes there some filtering criteria). Fills out a card with needs/wants, kids gender and age, maybe something from the kid about their likes/dislikes. Organizer keeps a master list with contact information private, transfers information to paper ornaments hung on Christmas trees or taped to windows for customers/employees to sign up to be responsible for. There’s a deadline for when the stuff is supposed to be dropped off well before the distribution is planned, giving the organizing place time to do last minute “we’ll just send out employees/managers to be responsible” if somebody picks a kid and never shows back up.
The families and the donator never meet, everything is done with the organizer being a buffer for privacy, the organizer checks the unwrapped and new gifts and when everything is ready the families are contacted or there is a window for the families to check back with the organizer for pickups.
Where I’m at, its the local bank branches, grocery store, and churches that run them.
I wonder if reaching out to other places in the community, they’d be willing to share some of the work of getting the kids taken care of with a similar event.
I’m sure it happens here but I’m really not invested in Christmas because I’m pretty doggedly atheist and if they do this stuff then my guess is that it happens mostly through association groups or malls and shit, and I avoid malls like the plague lol. I also suspect that these Angel Tree type events would probably target a demographic that is a notch or two above the poverty level that the mutual aid org I’m associated with works to serve. We definitely get the working poor types who are just barely scraping by but a whole lot of the people we see are more like what you’d see at Skid Row – lots of people who are really down on their luck.
I think in future it would be cool to branch out and engage with other Angel Tree operations but at the moment the org is mostly focused on the weekly push to get everything together and it doesn’t have much capacity to organise beyond that. Because of the classist attitude here it’ll be a bit of a tougher sell because we see a lot of people who are outside of that “respectable poor” category and there are a lot of people we see who struggle with addiction and serious mental illness and really harsh poverty so it means that a mall or a bank isn’t going to want anything to do with someone like that because they only want the “deserving poor” types.