KIND’s social services staff across the United States hold festive holiday events for clients to share gifts, celebrate the end of year, enjoy special food, and be together in community. In this guest blog by Dennise Onchi-Molina, social services coordinator at KIND’s Los Angeles office, Dennise describes the partnerships that can have a magical impact on our clients.
A Magical Day
For this year’s holiday event, the goal of my colleagues and I on the social services team was to make it magical, so our theme was “Un Dia Mágico,” a magical day. Ten families participated. We played games including lotería, an iconic game of Mexican bingo, and clients had a blast. The winners from each round were able to select mystery gifts from our sponsors that we had set aside for our youth.
Winter break is around the corner, which means limited or no access to school meals, which many of our clients rely on. We had grocery bags prepared for our clients to take home.
Giving Kids Gifts and Building Community through Partnerships
Several of our partners made this event possible. Our team partnered with our building, ELAT Properties, who graciously provided us with a spare office location to host our event and helped us hold a toy drive in our building. USC Keck Hospital and Keck Medicine of USC and Hispanic and LatinX employee resource group La Voz helped us gather donations by leaving empty boxes for anyone to drop off hygiene items for our youth at the hospital and in their offices.
Dignity Not Despair, an organization we regularly partner with which donates makeup and hygiene products to female refugees, provided us with more hygiene items and 40 makeup bags. Baby2Baby donated a variety of toys like LEGOs and stuffed animals that our clients were able to take home. We also had community members “sponsor” a KIND client who would share with a social services coordinator three “wishes” or gifts they would like to receive this holiday season. Our social services intern created an Amazon Wishlist for each client. Gifts began to arrive at their homes and our office starting in November! In total, 57 KIND clients in Los Angeles were sponsored by supporters who wanted to make their holiday season just a bit brighter. Most clients had all three wishes granted.
Celebrating our Clients’ Joy
A 17-year-old client who participated was so excited to receive her gifts that when receiving a makeup bag, her eyes lit up and said, “You guys think of everything!” When handing gifts to another client who arrived a few months ago, he asked me to take a picture with all his gifts. It was a very beautiful thing to see. The excitement on their faces when unwrapping the items was amazing.
The smiles on our clients’ faces were so great to see and affirmed that the event was a total success: a magical day. We couldn’t have done it without community support and engagement. It’s so important to build connections with local hospitals and agencies. Not only does it benefit our youth but also brings awareness to unaccompanied children. It’s vital to also showcase these connections to our clients for them to realize they have these community members and resources to lean on during difficult times.
In this season of gratitude, KIND is thankful for our amazing social services team, our generous partners, and our clients.
