Through the Eyes of a Child
MSC office - Toys for Tots Drive
With the recession making the approaching holidays seem for many of us about as joyous as a midnight tax audit, we might all do well to regress a little bit and revisit the holidays as seen through the eyes of a child. Everyone remembers how exciting and filled with fun and anticipation those days were. The sights, sounds and smells; not to mention the expectations of surprises to unwrap, delicious holiday meals to inhale and families coming together at the end of every year was enough to make even the worst times stop dead in their tracks—if only for a few days.
Making the holidays special for a child makes them special for all of us. That’s why even with its huge philanthropic heart very much in tact, Southwest Florida still has its work cut out for it this holiday season. The unemployment rate—now hovering at 11.2 percent statewide—is at least a full percentage point higher in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte Counties—thus forcing not a few families to make the gut-wrenching choice between paying the bills and putting food on the table and gifts into little hands.
This is not to say that the community hasn’t already stepped-up commendably to address the widespread fallout created by the worst recession and housing crisis since the Great Depression. Yet the growing tsunami of need has vastly outstripped just about every charity’s ability to provide the necessary depth of even its core services.
According to last week’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, volunteers at All Faiths Food Bank “sorted and boxed 936,000 pounds of donated food over the last three months—a 17 percent increase over the same period last year.” Even so, they were still forced to dip into their cash reserves to come up with the one million pounds of food requested by 160 area food pantries. Such reserves are fast being depleted at charities throughout the region, as contributions from individuals and corporations also fall victim to hard times.
