2. Community Service and Leadership Description This was the 27th year for the Bob Telmosse’ Christmas Giveaway This is a no questions asked giveaway. Children are allowed to pick one new gift for themselves, then we help them secretly select a gift for their parent which gets wrapped for them to take. All the kids get to try and win a bicycle in a raffle (only 500 were donated so not every kid could get a bike). From there the families are given a sack of groceries and a frozen chicken or turkey. Prior to the event, our job was to help set up in the empty store space donated by mall. During the event, we helped with last minute setup, crowd control, and handing out frozen chickens and turkeys, and running the bicycle raffle.
3. Supervisor Description This was the largest year ever. We served over 10,000 people at the giveaway on December 23, 2009. We rely on donations from the community in the form of new toys, food, and money. This year we were blessed to have a location donated and available to us three weeks prior to the event. This allowed us to get volunteers in each weekend setting up the “store”. The volunteers work very hard and do everything from clean up, set up, picking up donations from collection sites, and bagging the food, to crowd control, helping kids pick out gifts, wrapping gifts, etc. The Board of Directors runs the event. My mom is on the board and supervised all volunteers and was responsible for the food and bicycle portion of the giveaway.
4. The Crowds Gather While the doors did not open until 9:00 a.m., people began lining up after midnight. We arrived at 6:00 a.m. and the crowd was several hundred already and began wrapping around the outside of the mall. Thankfully is was not snowing! Our first chore was to grab the boxes of donated coats and blankets and begin handing them out to the people in line. Our priority was the babies and small children
5. Inside the Store The mall donated an empty store to us for the giveaway. It was great because there were shelves we could us. We spent two full weekends cleaning trash out of the empty store and then stocking shelves with the new toys.
6. The Food Area We bagged 4,000 bags of groceries This picture shows the staging area of the groceries Families of four or less got one bag, larger families got two Each bag contained fresh potatoes, two cans of vegetables, two cans of fruit, a box of stuffing, rolls, spaghetti sauce, pasta, and miscellaneous items
7. Handing out Turkeys We kept the chickens and turkeys frozen by handing them out from the bed of a truck outside as people exited the giveaway. This picture shows some of the volunteers watching the crowd and waiting for the first people to come out Mason is wearing the hoodie with the hood up
8. Conclusion Prior to the event we worked about 16 hours helping clean out the store and set things up On the day of the event we worked 11 hours straight from 6:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. A handful of the volunteers worked all 11 hours. It took over 400 volunteers to pull the event off We were exhausted at the end of the day. In some ways it was a very satisfying exhaustion because of the people who were so incredibly grateful for what we were doing for them. In other ways it was disappointing. Our mom explained ahead of time that because this is a no questions asked event, there will be people who are not necessarily needy who show up, many of whom are there to scam the system. We could tell who those people were….they were not grateful. They were demanding and yelled when they got a turkey but said they stood in line because the thought they could get a ham. There were also kids who won bikes in the raffle and their parents would pull up in their $50,000 tricked out truck to load up the bikes. While those things were disappointing, all-in-all it was gratifying to help kids who would otherwise not have anything for Christmas pick out their new toy.
