Toy drives struggle to fill needs of needy families

Dec. 03--The Cape's holiday toy drives are in full throttle now, as an increasing number of families are signing up for donations of toys and games for the little ones and gift cards for teens.

The Family Pantry of Cape Cod in Harwich is still getting calls for assistance, although it already has registered 1,000 children for its toy drive -- the maximum it can handle.

The Falmouth Service Center is opening its holiday toy program to families from Mashpee for the first time, and A Baby Center in Hyannis has capped the number of families who can attend the center's Dec. 6 Christmas party.

"Calls for assistance are up from last year," said Major Cynthia Brown of the Hyannis Salvation Army, which distributed more than 6,000 toys last year.

Just as more Cape residents are using food pantries to help feed their families, they are increasingly turning to toy drives to avoid straining their already tenuous budgets even further at Christmas, directors of nonprofit organizations say.

"The need is huge," said Christine Menard, director of the Family Pantry of Cape Cod.

The pantry's Christmas toy drive, which provides children from infants to age 14 with gifts and family games and puzzles, has just about tripled in size over the past five years, Menard said.

Last year it served 1,100 children, but this year the pantry capped the number at 1,000.

"It gets too big for us to manage it," Menard said. "They're still calling now looking for help. If they can't feed their families they certainly can't buy toys for their families."

This year, the number of people served by the pantry with food and clothing climbed to 9,500, a 12 percent increase over 2017, Menard said.

A combination of high costs of housing and day care, combined with low seasonal employment in winter, leaves families cash-strapped at Christmas, said Maureen Linehan, case manager with the Homeless Prevention Council in Orleans.

"There's such a crisis. There's no housing down here. There's no rentals," Linehan said. With such a limited supply, rents for whatever housing is available can be as high as $2,500 a month for a three-bedroom house on the open market, she said.

The Homeless Prevention Council -- which has a pop-up donation shop next to Staples in Orleans -- started its holiday toy drive for children and teens in 1995 after noticing that requests for financial assistance with fuel and emergency costs increased in January following the Christmas holiday, Linehan said.

The idea is to help people balance already tenuous budgets, Linehan said.

"My job is to empower people and make sure they are stable and safe."

The Falmouth Service Center encourages its food pantry clients to use the center's holiday programs so they save the rest of their money to pay basic bills, said service center executive director Brenda Swain.

"We have not included Mashpee before, but many of our clients who come for food have expressed a strong need for this support," so the service center opened its toy drive to clients from that town as well this year, Swain said.

At A Baby Center in Hyannis, more than 335 families have signed up for Thursday's Christmas party, and that's all the center can handle, said Elizabeth Okagbare, program assistant.

The center is seeing between 25 to 30 new families a month signing up for diapers, clothes and other baby supplies, Okagbare said. "There are new ones coming in faster than kids are aging out," she said.

Bins overflowing with footie pajamas, dolls, blocks, rattles, toy xylophones and sorting toys fill the back room of A Baby Center, which does not receive toys from Toys For Tots, said center director Robin Hayward.

Clients include people struggling with the high cost of area housing, grandparents and foster parents raising children, women from area shelters and mothers who had to leave work sooner than expect due to early labor, Hayward said.

Vanessa Vaz, a client and volunteer at A Baby Center, turned to the organization when her baby son's severe reflux prevented her from returning to work, leaving her wife as the family's sole wage-earner.

"They were very important to me. I have no family here," said Vaz, who now volunteers at A Baby Center and provides translation services for Portuguese-speaking clients.

"Imagine a family that doesn't have anything and the kids are expecting gifts," said Vaz, whose son is now 11 months old. "They are like a Santa for children in need."

The number of requests for toys from the Marine Toys for Tots program goes up every year, said Mary Ellen Harrington, who directs the program for the Cape and Islands with her husband Timothy Harrington.

"A lot of people are finding us," Harrington said. Toys for Tots supplies toys to more than 20,000 children through nonprofit organizations including food pantries and the Salvation Army, churches and police stations, she said.

This year, Harrington is a little nervous that the annual Stuff A Bus toy drive will not bring in enough merchandise.

Held for years at Toys R Us in Hyannis, which is now closed, the Stuff A Bus event will now take place at two locations: Kmart in Hyannis and Walmart in Falmouth, Harrington said.

Kevin Matthews, of radio station WCOD, will man the bus at Kmart on Route 132, which will be parked there from 6 a.m. Friday through 6 p.m. Sunday, Harrington said.

The bus at Walmart in Falmouth will be staffed by other radio employees from 9 a.m. through early evening Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Harrington said.

"Last year we filled 33 school buses," Harrington said. "Without that, we'd have to turn away so many different organizations on the Cape."

-- Follow Cynthia McCormick on Twitter: @Cmccormickcct.

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