Every Christmas season, St. Johns University partners with Bread and Life, a non-profit organization based out of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, to provide food and toys for families who are grazing, or below, the poverty line.
First, Anthony Butler, Executive Director of Bread and Life, pre-selects a range of toys based on the "overall budget," which the families chose from. Then, once the requests are in they're sent out to the organization's partners.
St. John's contributes about 20-percent of the total amount of toys they receive annually, according to Butler, but the vast majority doesn't come from students. Jimmy Walters, assistant director of residence ministry, says there are two main contributors.
One is the Alumni who attend the annual Winter Carnival the university hosts, who give a toy in exchange for admission. The other, he says, is the Sunday morning parish community, who attend the St. Thomas Moore church on campus, and located in the lobby is a small lighted tree filled with dangling paper ornaments with specific toy requests, from matchbox cars to Elmo sticker books.
Tori Migliore, the director of campus ministry, challenged Walters and others, to come up with a new and creative approach to get students living on campus interested in becoming contributors. In a meeting, they brainstormed and were able to come up with something: a competition.
The competition would be among students living in the 9 residence halls in and around campus to see who could collect the most toys for the Sponsor-a-Family program this year.
They decided to call it the St. Nicholas Award, in honor of the Catholic feast of St. Nicholas that falls on the 6th of December, and the prize is a golden trophy, donated by a student's father, which resembles the Stanley Cup. Only this cup has golden Santa Claus perched at the top, grinning jovially at the victors.
Christmas trees, akin to the one in the campus church, were set in the lobby's and resident assistant offices in each residence hall. The students had a week and a half to collect the most toys and become the first recipients of the St. Nicholas award.
St. John's offered a full day of shuttle service to take students to toy stores, which Walters says, aren't close to the campus. He says he's aware of the transportation difficulties, and the fact that "college kids don't have much money."
"It wasn't as much as a success as we expected," he says, but it was by comparison. Donations by students in the four years he's held the position? Zero. This year? 15 total.
This was the first time out, he says, and there are still "many kinks to be worked out," such as giving notice in mid-November, instead of after students returned from thanksgiving break, as they did this year.
Despite the low turnout for the toy competition, St. John's donations were "gracious" according to Butler, and they were able to fulfill the quota this year. As Christa Treitmeier-Meditz, the sponsor-a-family coordinator shouts to the volunteers before they begin to pack the toys to deliver to the families,
"this year we have enough so that every single child gets a toy," all 2,500 of them.
Once the toy's have been collected, they are sent over to Bread and Life in Brooklyn, and volunteers from St. Johns package them to be delivered to the families in need.
Below are some photos of the process.
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