https://www.ccholidaypartnership.com/
Through the generosity of our caring community, the Holiday Partnership brings dignity, holiday nourishment, and cheer to people in need here in Crook County.
Each year, the Holiday Partnership brings together donors and volunteers, schools, businesses, neighborhoods, service organizations, and others to make this happen.
In 2022, the Holiday Partnership served around 2,100 individuals with food, gifts, personal items, and/or clothing, including:
~ 548 children
~ 175 elders & people with disabilities
~ 54 people who were unhoused
~ 63 veterans
The Holiday Partnership has supported those in need in Crook County for nearly 30 years.
It's a tremendous feat of logistics coordinated by a largely Volunteer Planning Team that organizes the key components, including which businesses are hosting food drives or collecting Toys for Tots, where Trees of Joy will be hosted, and who is willing to take a group of names or multiple families to fulfill their gift wishes.
The Holiday Partnership provides assistance for eligible households to enjoy a holiday meal of their choosing. The Community Holiday Food Drive engages all of us as well as grocery stores, schools, service organizations, neighborhoods, and others in a massive community-wide effort to collect non-perishable pantry staples, like pasta, rice, and canned goods to replenish household pantries and enlarge the inventories of Crook County Food pantries.
The Trees of Joy are quite a process as well. An application process welcomes anyone in Crook County who is eligible as a low-income resident to apply. Each application is verified for accuracy. Volunteers create a tag for each individual who has asked for gifts, pre-allocate the requests that we have for group fulfillment, and place the remaining tags on the trees displayed across the county. Community members select as many tags as they want to fill, and bring the tag(s) and the gifts back to the tree location to check them in by mid-December.
All of this comes together in mid-December. Volunteers collect the food, toys, gifts, and clothing from drop locations and gather everything at our distribut. They begin the process of sorting by family, verifying that the gifts fit the requests, and filling the food boxes. Distribution takes place on December 20-21, 2023.