Since 1953, the Santee Santas Foundation, a local nonprofit, provides help to members of the community in need of assistance living within the Santee School District boundaries. Each year, Santee Santas collects holiday children’s toys and grocery store gift cards to bring the Christmas spirit to more than 150 families in the community. Its senior outreach program helps seniors in the community who live alone or in senior care facilities, ensuring them that they are not forgotten over the holidays.
Santee Santas President Tonya Hendrix said providing food and toys during the holiday season is its main mission.
“We also have an emergency fund for disasters, such as fire, in which we provide families with restart money,” she said. “But during the holiday season we do two things. We try to provide two weeks’ worth of food for the families. We used to provide a holiday meal prior to COVID where we gave fresh turkeys, oranges, butter, milk…but once COVID hit, we could not do that because we could not have these big crews putting these things together. Now we provide two weeks of food and a gift card so they can buy their holiday meal.”
Hendrix said for the children, 0-17 years old, they provide gifts.
“For 0-10 years-old, we select and wrap gifts for each child. They get books, family games, stocking stuffers,” she said. “For kids 11-17 years-old, we provide them with books, a family game, but they get a gift card to spend as a way for them to get what they really want.”
Hendrix said applications begin in October and closes Dec. 1.
“In the past we used to do a big food collection from the schools. Again, something that changed with COVID,” she said. “So now, the schools have gift card drives from the local grocery stores. We use those to give the families gift cards. And we purchase food so we can provide meals also. We try to provide things that make good meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner for each of the families.”
Hendrix said they only do toy donation boxes now, not food, but if they get some, they will use it because they provide meals for seniors in the community.
“Their boxes are a little different from the family boxes,” she said. “One, because they are seniors and there are usually only one or two people. They eat smaller amounts, and we also found there are some things that they just do not eat. During COVID, we worked with the city to provide food for about 40 seniors every two weeks. There are businesses throughout Santee and a couple in Lakeside that collect our toy boxes.”
Hendrix said the volunteer organization uses volunteers for several projects. The organization does not own a building, but every year, they must look for someone to loan them a building as a staging area for wrapping toys and creating gift packages. She said for the second year, John Farizell has given them a building to work out of in the Home Depot shopping center, and the owners of the Mimi’s Café building has given them space as well. She said once they get a building, they must move everything from storage. American Eagle Self Storage gives them free storage. The donated buildings are used as setup stages for the seasonal drives.
“We do shop for each child and each family in our setting of donations,” she said. “Volunteers shop, wrap, and box those toys. So, we people to do that. We also need volunteers to pack the boxes of food according to the family sizes. We will have everything set up on our website by Dec. 1 with a link for volunteers. They can sign up for when they want to volunteer. They can sign up for their preference to wrap toys, create food boxes, and we will send them a message when it is time for them to come in and help us get these gifts ready for distribution.
