The Lion’s Club’s Santa’s Anonymous campaign has started again for another year.
Santa’s Anonymous is a charity that runs once a year near Christmas with the goal of giving basic foodstuffs and toys to families in need. It’s been in the Athabasca area for almost 25 years and there are usually around 100 families in the area that benefit from the program.
“It seems for the years we’ve covered it as the Lion’s Club, it’s been improving every year. And last year, where we had delivered all hampers on a Friday with one left on Saturday, which in year’s prior to that we were scrambling anywhere from up to a dozen to almost 20 hampers left over,” said Mike MacLean, Athabasca Lion’s Club president.
MacLean added that it is definitely a program that is necessary in Athabasca.
“We know that every day of every year there’s families who are really struggling and a lot of them are the so-called working poor. So, they’re working their hearts out, they’re often raising kids and this time comes around,” he said.
“It’s nice to be able to show up with a hamper, just with some basic foodstuffs, whatever gifts we can bring in for donations.”
Each hamper has a turkey, mandarin oranges and some dry goods.
“It’s pretty basic stuff. But, boy does that add up after a while. It’s really easy to spend money when it’s that quantity and we are lucky that Buy Low has been very good to us over the years and they help us out as much as they can,” explained MacLean.
Although they try not to buy toys for the hampers – there are donation bins in Shoppers, Red Apple and the Dollar Store – they do sometimes have to buy gift cards for older children.
“We do purchase, usually quite a few cards from places like Value Drugs, where there’s a good coverage of stuff younger and teens will enjoy and the same with Cheap Seats, so we look at that,” he said.
MacLean stated they get some concerns on whether the hampers will be going to “worthy” families or if the families will “abuse” the hampers.
“I can only think ‘How does the government of Canada know that welfare isn’t abused’ and ‘what is abuse?’ I don’t think hampers are going in households where it’s an absolute travesty by any means,” he added.
“We’re doing our best to make the most of whatever people donate.”
The program has been run by the Lions Club for the last few years, with help from Edwin Parr Composite (EPC) – teachers Suzanne Beckett and Rhonda Anderson are running the EPC portion this year.
“With these two teachers coming in, they’ve just got really great ideas and the talk is how much of this can students plan and maybe one day this could be a student run project. Which I think would be one of the most exciting developments ever, really,” said MacLean.
They also get a lot of support from Cenovus – who donates funds and toys every year – and the Hawg Flatts Motorcycle Association – which holds a toy drive every year.
The hampers are put together at EPC on the last day of classes and are delivered over the weekend. Many of the deliverers come back every year to help.
Any who would like to sponsor a family or would like to request a hamper, MacLean asked that they e-mail the charity at [email protected].
They hope to eventually get a phone number as well, but they had not gotten one as of press time.
