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Annual Toy Drive Shares Season's Spirit With Sick Children, Students
Nov. 19, 2014
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
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| Brent Estes's sport administration class (above) is collecting toys for patients at Texas Children's Hospital, to spread the holiday cheer to those seeking treatment, while also providing relief to financially strapped parents. Donations of both new toys and money will be collected through Dec. 10, when students and administrators will travel to Houston to deliver the toys. |
While Christmas is often thought of as a celebratory season filled with gifts and food, for many families in need, Christmas also can be a very trying time, both financially and emotionally—especially when illness is involved.
For the past seven years, Sam Houston State University has worked to bring a little merriment to the families of those undergoing treatment at Texas Children’s Hospital by hosting a holiday toy drive.
The drive began as a small class service project for associate professor of sport management Brent Estes’s students in 2008 and has grown “tremendously” over the years, he said.
It came about when, after a moment of perspective on a very bad day, Estes shared a story with his students.
When 'Santa' visits Texas Children's Hospital... |
“In 2008, my son, who was 4 at the time, was having chronic ear infections and I took him to Texas Children’s for a follow up. I was having a bad day when I went in and I was real short with him; it’s one of those days when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed,” Estes said. “I got in the waiting room and I looked around and there are all these other people with real problems; I just realized that everything is second compared to the health of your children and how blessed we were.
“So, of course, I felt terrible for having a bad attitude, and I shared that with my students the next day as this life-lesson kind of moment,” he said. “Somehow, it matriculated into a service project. We kind of put it together last minute that year with about two weeks’ notice, but it was great.
“We said next year we were going to do it again and do it better, and we’ve just tried to do it better every year.”
And better it has been. Thanks students going out and collecting corporate sponsors, his students have managed to collect things such as 14 bicycles and gift cards from Walmart, generating what Estes conservatively estimates to be more than $40,000 worth of money and toys.
“They (Texas Children’s) say by far, Sam Houston does the most with respect to philanthropic efforts than any other business or organization that is affiliated with the hospital,” Estes said. “It’s not uncommon this time of year for other organizations to do what we’re doing. For example, Haliburton donates 500 Teddy bears and some of ExxonMobil’s executives will go and interact with the kids. But no one does what we do, not on the scale that we do it.
“We collect as much as we can,” he said “You wouldn’t believe the amount of toys that we bring, and it’s not just little stuff; we bring Xboxes, Wiis and laptops.”
Partnering this year with Lake Conroe Realty, they expect to do even more; the company is even working to pull together enough resources to charter a bus to transport SHSU’s group to Houston to deliver the toys.
Owner Allison Yancy said the decision to partner with SHSU’s students was a personal one.
Though she’s not an SHSU alumna, she, too, has had experience with TCH, which influenced her decision to help.
“I have been in the very seat of some of these families at Texas Children's Hospital. Our daughter Hailey contracted a staph-based pneumonia on her second birthday and we ended up in the hospital for about two weeks. It was a touch-and-go situation and very scary,” Yancy said. “At that very moment, it made me realize how quickly things can change and happen in our lives. One day everyone is totally healthy, and the next day you’re being rushed to the hospital and having ports put in your child's chest.”
Once the toys are collected, a group of 10-12 students, as well as faculty and administrators, caravan to the hospital, where they get to play Santa for an afternoon, going floor-to-floor and room-to-room passing out toys for the children.
Those who are able, come out to meet them as they push a medicine cart filled with toys; others require the SHSU group to go in and visit. Sometimes, according to Estes, they just have to leave gifts.
Whatever toys aren’t passed out are kept by the hospital for patients—and sometimes their siblings—that cannot go home for the holidays.
“During the week of Christmas, they try to send as many patients home as they can. The patients that they can’t send home, they’ll make several more rounds using the toys that we bring,” he said. “The siblings, in these cases, are given toys as well.”
While so often Estes said he sees students live in their own “bubbles”—and he, himself, was guilty of that when he was a student—the project allows students to get the best gift of all: the gift of experience.
“My students probably get more out of it than anybody,” Estes said. “The first year we went there were two siblings diagnosed with the same terminal illness. Their parents lived more than two hours away and they would take turns driving back and forth to keep their full-time jobs while the other stayed with the children, if you could imagine what that would be like; they were tapped out financially.
“We were told about them before we got there and when we did we had all sorts of toys and stuff so they could have Christmas,” he said. “The mom is emotional and she’s crying, the staff members are crying, and the students are crying. It was just a great way for the students to see the kind of impact they can make by giving back. So that’s really the lesson for the students—it really puts things in perspective for them—and I think there’s a lot of benefit for them as well.”
Yancy said the experience of delivering the toys is something that both she and her son Austin are grateful to have been a part of.
“I have never been so moved! Walking into these rooms with these children and their families and delivering these toys and electronic devices and seeing the looks of joy and tears in their eyes of appreciation was so overwhelming,” she said. “To see my son experience this as well was such a touching moment that he and I will never forget. It is and will always be etched in our hearts.”
Those who would like to donate a toy to this year’s drive must follow rules set out by the hospital, which include that the toy must be new and unwrapped and cannot include any religious affiliations.
Toys can be dropped off until 11 a.m. on Dec. 10 in the main office for the departments of health and kinesiology, on the second floor of the Health and Kinesiology Center. Monetary donations will also be accepted online, through Dec. 9.
“We spend every dime we collect on buying toys, and we try to fill in the gaps of what we’re lacking from the age and gender standpoint,” Estes said. “The age range is from birth to 20 for patients at the hospital and because there are 16 floors, we never know what the census is going to be.”
For more information, contact Estes at 936.294.1159 or visit the toy drive's Facebook page.
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