Holiday Service Project: Needs for Essential Baby Care Items are Great at the Holidays
Holiday Service Project: Needs for Essential Baby Care Items are Great at the Holidays
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, family shelters usually receive donations of clothes, food and other items, but one thing that is often overlooked is the desperate need for baby care items.
In 2006 Daniel Levine, then a student at Shrewsbury high School, started the Massachusetts Children’s Fund to collect food and winter supplies for area infants in need. Since that time thousands of pounds of baby food have been delivered by that organization to area family shelters. Your students can follow Daniel’s lead and start their own baby food and care item drive with this service project idea!
Service Project Materials
• Poster boards
• Flow pens
• Computers
• Telephones
• Boxes and bubble wrap for packing baby food jars
• Colored construction paper and crayons or markers
Note: Boxes are available from grocery stores. If bubble wrap is not available, old newspapers can be used to pack jars.
Instructions
1. Contact local family shelters in your area. There are many on-line sites that list family shelters in specific areas.
2. Explain you are a member of your homeschool group or church and tell them you are organizing a baby food and supplies drive.
3. Explain that extra care will be given in packaging the baby food to prevent glass breakage.
4. Using poster board, make signs to be displayed in churches or other community area. Also ask local businesses to display signs. Be sure signs designate what you want (for example: baby food in glass jars, small vacuumed packed milk cartons, small juice cartons, powdered baby formula, canned soups, canned fruit, unopened packages of diapers in all sizes, and clean clothing such as warm jackets, mittens and scarves). Make note of how and when and where donations can be made.
5. Contact local grocery stores to ask for donations, contact baby food manufacturers and diaper and baby clothes manufacturers and ask for donations. Use online social networking sites and e-mail to get the word out. Always name your group affiliation.
6. Enlist the help of parents to pick up and deliver donations.
7. Set-up an on-going organization of volunteers who will continue their good works after the holidays.
8. Young children can make pretty pictures on construction paper with crayons or markers to put into the boxes of baby food. They can add ”We Love You” “God Loves you” etc. on pictures.
For more great service project ideas, check out Christianity Cove’s service project index!
I really enjoyed this article. I went to your page and read up on other service projects as well. There are some great ideas pisted – thank you so gery much for sharing!