Between our “Holiday Angels” donors who shopped for kids in need in Orlando… and our local Hastings on Hudson, New York area donors who donated toys for our local toy drive, we collected over 750 toys for kids living in poverty in December! Our “Holiday Angels” donors shopped for exactly what the Orlando kids recommended by our community partner had asked for, and their parents were able to wrap the gifts and give them out as if from themselves on Christmas morning. And in Hastings, donated toys were laid out at the Hastings community center to look like a toy store, so that struggling parents could come in to “shop” for their children — no funds needed!
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40 elderly residents at the Andrus on Hudson nursing home (down the road from our Hastings on Hudson, NY office) had gifts to open in December thanks to some generous local families! We received a list of seniors living there who have no family, or no local family, and we reached out to our community for help with gifts! In no time our office was filled with wrapped presents for all of them.
We try to be flexible and responsive when it comes to the myriad needs in the communities where we help, so when we heard that the Orlando food pantry we support was using ancient, rusty freezers that didn’t close properly, we raised funds to replace them with two new ones.
Every summer our Orlando community partner, Pauline Jackson, organizes her mammoth “Back to School Jamboree”… a giveaway event where she hands out backpacks, school supplies and uniforms to as many as 500 low income children whose families visit her food pantry. Through individual donations, Family-to-Family raises the funds for those items, which we purchase and have sent to Pauline in time for her giveaway. This year we provided 500 backpacks filled with supplies, 250 additional packets of paper, and $3,000 for school uniforms. Read more here.
When 66 asylum seekers landed in mid-June in Ardsley, New York, a town located a stone’s throw from our offices, Family-to-Family joined up with several other local nonprofits to help provide for their immediate needs. To date, thanks to our donor’s generosity, we’ve been able to give each adult $100 in Visa gift cards, supplied each person with a backpack full of personal care products, with a duffle bag so they can carry their things, and distributed new strollers, kids’ clothing and shoes. These families have travelled a long way — they started in Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Russia, Congo, Guinea and Senegal, and all crossed into the U.S. at the southern Texas border. From there they were sent to New York. Our goal is to make them feel welcome in their new community! Other organizations are stepping in with food and adult clothing, and a local summer camp is providing free camp for the children. We hope to continue to provide Visa gift cards until everyone finds a job! You can join our effort here.
We’re thrilled that our first ever Passover Dinner Drive resulted in extra Seder foods for all 200 Holocaust survivors in our program! We provided each struggling survivor with an extra $50 grocery gift card at the end of March so they could choose and purchase Passover holiday foods. The idea for the drive came from one of our donors, who suggested we do something similar to our Thanksgiving Turkey drive, with Passover foods in mind. One of our liaisons with a community of survivors in Los Angeles wrote, “This is particularly helpful because many of the grocery assistance programs which started during Covid have ended, and it’s a difficult adjustment.”
