The organizers of a large holiday food, toy, and clothing donation drive in Chatham-Kent are over the moon about this year's collection success.
Blenheim drive captain and spokesperson for The Gift, Brent Wilken, said the final numbers are not known yet but he feels the campaign collected more than what anyone was expecting. He said "whatever it is it's a lot." Wilken noted some areas got less than last year but some got more and a lot more organizations will benefit from this than what was previously anticipated.
Wilken noted The Gift is a movement aimed at finding more people in need of help, including those who fall through the cracks at the more traditional charities. He said his group is better equipped to find the proverbial needle in the haystack because there are a few homeless area captains from a shelter who know all the nooks and crannies in the municipality.
"It felt like for everybody it was just an amazing community day and for myself, it was my first time doing the actual pick up myself. I got to experience the real joy with the community and the honking," said Wilken. "A lot of healing happened on Saturday and the days following and there will be even some more coming together in Chatham-Kent in terms of us all on the same mission now. We have stuff and we now all as a community have to figure out how it will go the furthest."
Wilken is talking about some animosity between some of the various local food drives.
Wilken said the final donation tally and a full list of who is getting the donations probably won't be complete until closer to Christmas.
He said lessons were learned to improve the operations for next year, if the community wants to have a third event. Wilken said earlier planning for next year will help get the word out earlier and added some kinks still have to be worked out.
"We learned more this year than last year because last year was an anomaly in terms of we're never going to be in the middle of COVID-19 where all of the programs are in trouble and all of Chatham-Kent comes to save it," Wilken said. "We very easily could have not done it this year, there were so many competing messages, there was so much else going on and for Chatham-Kent to pull this off to me we achieved a more impressive feat this year."
Donations were collected by volunteers on Saturday and will be distributed to needy families until Christmas. He said some groups already have their donations in hand but more will be found or come forward as time goes on. A homeless shelter is already planning a Secret Santa event for its residents, according to Wilken.
"To find everybody between now and December 25 is not all on the agencies, the agencies can only find so many. The citizens need to find the other half."
Wilken also said some people would rather suffer in silence than come forward to get help and that's when The Gift "sensitivity callers"convince them it's alright to get help.
Wilken noted he is sore after the day of collection but feels like the mission was accomplished.
"I'm sitting here like a pile of garbage but feel like I'm on top of the world," he said.
