by Rosanne Ortega

I haven’t ever had YOUR coffee yet but I certainly remember the Christmas without coffee… and how production limped along.

I run a children’s charity in North Texas that provides books, balls and learning toys three times a year to low income children.  As you may have guessed, the toys are gathered at Xmas and we distribute about 38,000 each season so we use a lot of helping hands.  We have a huge warehouse site where we sort and package the gifts for each family using about 700 volunteers between Thanksgiving & December 20.  For the last 5 years, we rely on donations for snacks and drinks. 

Last year, our coffee donation fell through.   I can’t tell you HOW much that impacted our volunteers.  EVERYONE commented on the lack of coffee.  We had cookie snacks from Frito Lay but no coffee to go with them – that means the folks who came straight from work to volunteer a couple of hours complained.  We had Mrs. Baird sweet rolls on Sat & Sun morning but no coffee so the weekenders were upset about that.  IT WAS ALL I HEARD ABOUT FOR A GOOD TWO WEEKS… “what happened?” “no coffee this year?”

It really wasn’t good enough to offer them Coca Cola products instead – Jeez, I mean there is caffiene in them too!

As a charity, with funding down last year, we didn’t budget for coffee for hundreds of folks but I WILL NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN!

Anyway, our charity, Navidad en el Barrio website is http://www.navidaddfw.org/ if you want to check us out!

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