Coast Guard Family & Friends Holiday Stockings for Homeless Children

Mission

Provides handmade stockings filled with small basic and educational needs, with new useful essentials, gifts and toys for homeless children, ages infant through teen years, living in or reached through shelters in our Puget Sound Area.

Description

It is difficult to imagine a life without a home to go to each night. Yet this is the unsettled life of well over 5,000 homeless children in the Puget Sound area. Coast Guard Family and Friends Holiday Stockings for Homeless Children's mission is to bring basic needed items as well as small fun gifts and toys to our most needy and vulnerable children. Begun with just a few hundred stockings in 1996 with Coast Guard wives, the program has grown to 5000 stockings. Children included infants through teens, living in over 120 shelters in the Puget Sound area. Up to 700 unsheltered street youth are reached through youth shelters and are included in these totals.

Holiday Stockings is an all-volunteer 501(c)3 charity in operation for 29 years. 95% of donations go directly to fill the children's stockings. Our organization's all-volunteer six-member Board of Directors oversees the planning, management and budgeting for all the charity's activities.

Stocking contents are individually tailored for each child by age and gender. Over 800 dedicated volunteers from business, community, church, school, clubs, families and individuals assisted in filling over 74,660 stockings for children in the last 28 years.
The stuffed stockings are delivered to the shelters and given to the children at a Holiday Party, often with a Santa. We receive heartfelt notes of thanks from the children, mothers and shelter staff. Some shelters reported the stockings hung for weeks by children's beds to remember this special season.

GiveBIG May 7th & 8th

GiveBIG Washington is an on-line giving event for Washington State non-profit organizations. Individuals and organizations can make investments in local charities which they consider worthy. We thank all of our supporters from previous years and want to let everyone know that we will again be participating this year. The event is scheduled for May 7th and 8th. Early giving has started. Help us reach our goal of $5,000 by clicking on the Donate button now!