According
to the Good Morning America Holiday Toy Drive website over 13 million children in the United States live
in poverty. For these children, Christmas without a present isn’t just
a bad dream on a website or in a presentation--it's a horrible reality.
But there is hope. The United States Marine Corps Reserves (USMCR) Toys for Tots Program helps bring toys to children through
the generosity of people in the community. According to the Toys for Tots website,
“The Origin and Evolution of Toys for Tots”, the program raised over 15.1 million toys for 6.5 million kids in
2003 alone.
So what does that have to do with this site? A lot, actually. In the fall
of 2004, the creator of this site realized that there was a woeful lack of information on efforts to support the Toys For
Tots program in Northern and Western Wisconsin. Further, she realized that the state had a wealth of relatively untapped
resources in the thousands of college students on campuses statewide. An inadvertent test run of college student interest
as the result of a speech class yielded astounding results, and the idea of Searching4Santa began to form.
Searching4Santa is a non-profit, grass-roots, completely volunteer effort to spread
the word about needy children in Northern and Western Wisconsin. It is also a springboard to dispelling the myth that
college students are by and large apathetic and completely ignorant of the world around them. The goals of the program
are remarkably simple: spread a message of hope by collecting toys for children in need.
