The Story of the 2009 Community Toy Store

Before I begin…a huge shout out to all the folks that made this happen.  Without the close working relationship of Rebound and Roosevelt Community Church an event of this magnitude would be impossible to pull off.  A special shout out to Rebound’s Vista Volunteer (In this instance volunteer means you get paid so little it’s really a volunteer position…except it’s not) Jessica Baumer.  Jessica put in countless hours doing the nitty gritty details of the Community Toy Store….so if you ever meet her, give her a big hug or a thank you or a tip.

Well, another year has come and gone for the Community Toy Store.  There were four of us who got together starting in September to begin the planning of this year’s event.  Two folks from Rebound and two of us from Roosevelt Community Church.

We talked about our expectations of this year’s Community Toy Store effort, we talked about how many families we might be able to serve, and we talked about who was going to do what.  I think it is safe to say that we had no idea of how crazy or successful this year would be.

September came and went, followed by October.  We were all making phone calls and bringing on board Partners from last year and quite a few new Partners…

November came and then it hit me, we were on the home stretch.  About mid November is when the thoughts of…”boy can we pull this off?”  With the right Help, we could…we thought…

Every year the Community Toy Store has doubled in the number of families served.  So we were hoping/expecting about 160 families, based on last years data, to attend the Community Toy Store of 2009.  We had over 270 volunteers sign up to help!

Friday night, December 11th, has arrived.  We had 20+ volunteers show up the day before to help with pricing of the toys at CBF.  We had over 50 volunteers show up to help move the toys over to Birchwood Elementary and get the Community Toy Store all setup!

By about 5:30, 1 hour before the Community Toy Store was supposed to open, we had a dozen or more people lined up at the entrance to the school.

At 6:15, we had amassed enough volunteers to open the doors and get the 2009 Community Toy Store rolling.  At this time there was at least 100 people in line…

At 6:45pm we had at least 200+ people in line.  It was cold and most of them were outside.  We started having volunteers bring small kids to the front of the line and bring out hot coffee to the folks in the cold.  Maybe some cookies too. Like 3 or 4 platters full of yummy Christmas cookies.

By 7:30, we had a line all the way to the stop sign at the intersection of Birchwood and Pinewood.  We had had a run in with a disgruntled individual who did not like the model of the Community Toy Store.  However, we had about 150 friends that DID like the model of the Community Toy Store and so the disgruntled individual promptly departed…

The truth is that at 7:30pm we were not sure if we were going to have enough toys for everyone.  Typically the first night we get a big rush at the opening and then it trickles off.  Not this year.  This year it was like the waves of a tsunami, they just keep getting bigger and bigger until they get to where they wanted to go from the beginning.  We had officially “un-set aside” toys for Saturday as we realized this was going to be it.  We were going to go through all of our toys tonight.  No reason to make someone who has been standing outside for an hour come back in the morning…there were too many people in line for that.

By 8:00pm, we knew for sure that everything would be gone that night.  New shoppers had stopped arriving and it was beginning to look like we were going to run out of toys before we could serve them all.

By 8:30 we were completely out of toys and giftcards.  We had managed to serve every single family that showed up.  No one left empty handed.

In just a little over two hours we served 233 families, representing 779 children.  We sold almost $19,000 in donations.  The average family spent just $18 to provide Christmas for their family.

By all accounts, this year was a tremendous success.  Our only lament is that we did not have toys for a Saturday store and had to turn away about 50 cars on Saturday morning.

We nearly tripled our number of families served from last year!