Today was a whirlwind of excitement at Kidzz Helping Kidzz Christmas gift donations Headquarters.
At 8:00 AM, three of our amazing Kidzz Helping Kidzz holiday toy drive drivers each picked up a 15 foot U-Haul truck to collect our main toy drop off box near me, and 99 more throughout Kitsap County.
During the morning we also had numerous Christmas gift donations from individuals in the community who had held events in support of our toy drive.
We also had holiday toy drive deliveries from Church groups, neighbors and other members of the community who were attempting to donate toys for Christmas, but could no longer deliver to one of our toy drive collection boxes because it had already been picked up.
At 10:45 AM, we received a Facebook message from the store lead at PetSmart in Silverdale stating that they had 2,000 donate stuffed animals, new with tags for Kidzz Helping Kidzz donate toys to children's hospital toy program for Christmas.
We were amazed and delighted! Rhandel, our Board Vice President, reached out to them and went to pick up the hospital toy donations in his van.
He arrived back about 45 minutes later stating that he needed to pick up the rest of the toys in one of our rented 15 foot U-Haul trucks. He could only fit 400 of the new donate stuffed animals in his large van!
Our volunteers arrived ready to label and sort holiday toy donations and were amazed at the number of holiday giving toys that filled the downstairs rooms in our house. Our living room, dining room, study, garage, and shop were filled with new Christmas toy drive donations.
We immediately formed teams of people who would label the hospital toy donations and others who would sort and box them. Our garage quickly filled up as we stacked the Christmas gift donations higher and higher.
We then began to stack Christmas gift donations near me, in the shop. Within two hours, we had completed labeling and sorting about 75% of the Christmas toy donations near me.
Rhandel then headed off in the 15 foot U-haul to pick up the remaining 1,600 children's Christmas gift donations from PetSmart. While he was gone, we completed sorting all of the Christmas donation toys that we had at the house. We had received and labeled 6,550 Christmas gift donations!
We then decided to take a break and record a video of where we were at with our toy drive. The kids from our Advisory Board definitely had fun making this video!
We were completely surprised when the Minnie Mouse bike delivered its own message of support at the end!
Upon completing our toy drive update video, Rhandel drove up and opened the truck loaded with large bags of donate stuffed animals. There were so many of them we could not believe our eyes!
The kids had fun bringing them into the house as we opened them up and began to label each of the toys for toy drive. On average each large bag contained 25 new donate stuffed animals.
Our team ran out of steam at 6PM and we decided to call it a night. We had received 8,985 hospital toy donations! I think we were all in shock about the sheer volume of Christmas toy donations that we had received in support of our children's hospital Christmas gifts toy program for Christmas.
We will resume our toy labeling and sorting tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and then will load a 26 foot U-Haul truck for delivering the toys to the hospitals on Wednesday, December 22.
This evening, we can confidently say that these hospital toy donations will be brightening the lives of nearly 9,000 kids who will be spending their Christmas in the hospital.
Quite an accomplishment by several amazing Kidzz Helping Kidzz!
Our first Christmas donation toy drive several years ago consisted of having just four toy donation collection boxes in the Kitsap County community.
We are now fulfilling requests of over 100 toy drive boxes near me!
We greatly appreciate the support of our community! Please consider supporting Kidzz Helping Kidzz by donating toys, time or money to our cause.