UToledo Thanksgiving Lunch Launches Angel Tree Gifts for Toledo Children

TOLEDO, Ohio — The University of Toledo opened its season of giving on Monday, pairing the President’s Thanksgiving Lunch with the launch of Brighten the Holidays: The Angel Tree Project, the university’s annual holiday giving program run in partnership with the Salvation Army. The lunch, hosted by President James Holloway, ran from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Monday, November 9, in the Thompson Student Union Auditorium, according to UToledo News, the university’s official news service.

The Angel Tree works the way it has for years in communities across the country: a child in need is represented by an Angel, and a sponsor provides gifts for that child for the holidays. At UToledo, the program is organized by the Office of Student Engagement and Connections, and students, faculty, staff and campus organizations can all take part — by sponsoring an Angel, hosting a donation box, or dropping off gifts at Thompson Student Union Room 1532, UToledo News reported.

Donations of new, unwrapped toys, bicycles, scooters, books and stuffed animals will be accepted through Monday, December 7, according to UToledo News. The collected gifts will be delivered to the Salvation Army Toy Shop for distribution to local families — meaning a toy dropped off on campus in November is in a Toledo child’s hands before Christmas.

The timing is deliberate. The university paired the giving program’s launch with its traditional Thanksgiving lunch with the president — a standing campus gathering that put hundreds of members of the university community in one room at the start of the holiday season, with donation collection beginning at the door, according to UToledo News. Anyone who wants to sponsor an Angel or host a donation box can complete the form online, and questions go to [email protected], the university said.

Programs like this one are a fixture of the season in Lucas County, where the Salvation Army’s Toy Shop serves families who would otherwise face a thin Christmas. The university’s role is the volunteer and donor base: a campus of thousands of students and employees is one of the largest single pools of potential sponsors in the city, and the Angel Tree turns that scale into individual gifts matched to individual children.

The launch also lands in a month when Toledo’s community institutions are asking a lot of residents’ generosity at once — food drives, blood drives and holiday appeals all compete for the same dollars and the same weekend hours. Campus programs have one advantage: they meet people where they already are. A student crossing the Thompson Student Union this week walks past the drop-off point in Room 1532 whether or not giving was on the day’s list.

What happens next is a month-long collection window. Donations are accepted through Monday, December 7, after which the gifts move to the Salvation Army Toy Shop for distribution to local families, according to UToledo News. Sponsors who take an Angel rather than dropping off a general donation should note the same December 7 deadline — the Toy Shop’s distribution schedule depends on gifts arriving on time.

The university community’s Thanksgiving observance continues later this month: UToledo’s academic calendar lists the Thanksgiving break on November 26-27, with no classes and offices closed. The President’s Lunch and the Angel Tree launch were scheduled ahead of that break so the giving window runs the full stretch between Thanksgiving and the December deadline.

Related coverage from NewsForce247: the university has been in the news this fall for research as well as service — a UToledo researcher landed a $3.7 million grant to build a Lyme disease vaccine — and across town, the community’s investment in families continues as Toledo breaks ground on the $22 million Mission Point supportive housing project.

The partnership behind the program pairs two institutions that serve the same neighborhoods from different directions. The Salvation Army runs the Toy Shop distribution, matching donated gifts to families who have signed up for help, while the university supplies the sponsors and the collection point. UToledo News said the effort is organized on campus by the Office of Student Engagement and Connections — the same office that runs much of the university’s community-engagement programming — which means the Angel Tree is plugged into the campus volunteer networks that already exist rather than built from scratch each year.

For Toledo families, the measure of the Angel Tree will not be Monday’s lunch but the Toy Shop shelves in December. The university has set the table — a named program, a campus drop-off point, a sponsoring form and a deadline — and the next four weeks will show how many Angels the campus community takes home.

Photo: MrJacon000, CC BY-SA