The Huskies Holiday Toy Drive, a charitable program presented by the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, recently completed its second year, collecting unwrapped toys at Northeastern’s home games between Nov. 28 and Dec. 8 to donate to children around Massachusetts for the holiday season.
After partnering with the Wonderfund, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, or SAAC, assembled a collection of 321 toys along with $550 for the Teenage Gift Card program, where teenagers involved are able to choose what they want to buy with their choice of gift card.
“[The toy drive] coincides with our mission perfectly, and that’s how it started and then just grew from there,” said Anna Hirsch, the Wonderfund’s program coordinator.
The Wonderfund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves children and teens engaged with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, or DCF. The donations from SAAC go directly to the Dorchester DCF location, according to Hirsch.
“There’s 29 area offices across the state and the Wonderfund supports each one of those,” Hirsch said. “Those offices get toys, and in terms of the kids that they go to, any child with an open case.”
There are 50,000 children in and out of the foster care system who are involved in the Massachusetts DCF.
The Wonderfund partnership began with the Northeastern Athletics staff two years before students became involved. Staff “adopted” 20 children and were given each kid’s wish list for the holidays.
“We fulfilled [the lists] in like 48 hours. It was crazy,” said Becca Mitchell, the athletics department administrative and personnel coordinator and SAAC adviser.
When SAAC was looking to partner with an organization for the holidays in 2023, Mitchell had an idea to expand beyond the Northeastern athletics staff and bring the program to the rest of the athletics department.
Savion Thompson, a graduate student on the track team as well as the creative team coordinator for SAAC and the men’s CAA SAAC representative for Northeastern, said the commitee went to Mitchell with an idea to raise money for kids in need, causing the expansion of the project outside the department.
“We [said], ‘We can adopt a kid, but that’s one kid.’ We think we can make this much bigger than that. And so from there, we sat down and [the toy drive is] what we decided to do,” Thompson said.
Last year, the committee gathered 169 toys. This year, it collected more than 300.
“We were able to collect a ton of toys at that first game of the collection period, which was really great,” said Abigail Hassman, SAAC’s president and a graduate student on the cross country and track team. “We filled up three boxes or something like that just at the first game, so over a hundred toys.”
After the debut year, the committee started promoting the donations earlier in the year in hopes of improving its return. It also had donation bins available at all times in the Cabot Center in case donors couldn’t make it to a home game.
The toys from Northeastern Athletics will contribute to the Wonderfund’s overall goal of gifts for 30,000 children.
“The whole point of the group is bringing [the] community within athletics, bringing it out to our whole Northeastern community,” Mitchell said. “Then also the Greater Boston community.”
