Santa gets a little help with CPS kids’ list
For 10,483 Houston-area children cared for by Child Protective Services, Santa’s workshop is a warehouse tucked behind baseball fields in Oak Forest, staffed Saturday by a battalion of maskwearing folks social distancing their way between bikes and a pallet of Little People playsets.
“It started with a card table and a vision,” said Cindy Steele, a board member of Be A Resource for CPS Kids, the agency that oversees the annual BEARing Gifts event, now in its 30th year.
This year, volunteers navigated COVID along with children’s wish lists.
“We’ve really tried to help people from getting out,” said BEAR executive director Tammy Hetmaniak.
As a result, the stacks of workbooks, mounds of dump trucks and bins of soccer balls was joined this year by a haul from Amazon that would make FedEx blanche. Deliveries came in four times a day, Hetmaniak said. She joked that while their small fiveperson team doesn’t afford her the luxury of a receptionist, it became one person’s job to field all the calls of howto help and where to bring things.
Corporate partners helped too, including Tide Cleaners, whose vans pulled in and out of the Oak Forest site Saturday shuttling toys from 34 area locations.
“It’s been an awesome distribution spot,” said Kyle Nesbit, senior vice president of business devel-
opment for Tide in the Houston area.
Radio station KSBJ steered donors to area Kroger locations, as others poured into the warehouse parking lot Saturday.
Just as soon as many of the toys are sorted and checked off Santa’s list – aka Hetmaniak’s spreadsheet – they’ll be sent out again to their destination. BEAR works closely with county officials overseeing child services so each child in some stage of the CPS process – foster homes, shelters, adoptive families — have something to unwrap. Volunteers try to match the request as close as possible, though COVID even looked poised to complicate that. Hetmaniak said in mid-summer, right around the time plans get going, finding bikes was difficult.
“We had scooters ready just in
case,” she said.
Saturday, the staging area was littered with new bikes, brought in by dads in minivans and 20somethings pulling them from
the backseats of coupes.
“Every child deserves what they want for Christmas,” said Candace Rogers, 28, as she dropped off two large bags of gifts her mother compiled for a little girl.
Inside, Sister Mary Ana Steele move deliberately from aisle to aisle finding the right toy, talking with Cindy Steele— the sister’s sister — to fulfill wishes. Steele comes in from North Texas to help with the Christmas program.
The need for the thousands of children who come in and out of the CPS system – some for days, some for the rest of their childhoods – happen year-round, Hetmaniak said.
“We’re trying to provide normalcy in a very uncertain time,” she said.
Luckily, Hetmaniak added, they have plenty of help at the holidays and beyond.
“We did a call for hand sanitizer, when that became something we needed, and it was filled in days,” she said. “It never fails how generous our community is.”