Friday, December 20, 2013

A Place For Kids To Shop!

Some of our first customers!
There are still 4 more days to shop at "From Me To You," the holiday gift shop set up by Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas in Rolling Oaks Mall!  It's open til 6 pm on December 24th!
 
A little customer donates
Once upon a time the Big Brothers Big Sisters staff and board members looked at its waiting list of over 1,200 kids and said, "We love our donors, but we need more money to match more kids before it's too late!"  So they formed a crazy committee called the "Sustainable Revenue Committee" whose job it is to find and vet ideas to bring in new, non traditional donors to support the program.  This holiday season, the committee voted to invest in this special social enterprise venture:  a holiday retail gift store for kids to shop for gifts at!  So far we have had nearly 300 customers at the store and over 90% of them are new donors!!

The gifts through the window
The idea is simple:  one side of the store is a waiting area for parents to sit, relax, watch Christmas movies and drink hot cocoa while their kids shop, assisted by helper elves,on the other side of the curtain - where the gifts are displayed on shelves.  Parents make a donation which is converted to points which the kids use to select gifts for mom, dad, grandparents, siblings and friends.  They have to stay within their budgeted points.  They leave the store with a backpack full of under the tree ready wrapped gifts.  

The kids are loving it!

Parents relax while their kids shop.
A really cool thing about our store is that we have had shoppers in to buy for gifts for Angel Tree Families and other adopt a family programs.   QVC even came in and shopped for gifts for a "store" it set up at its offices for its Inspire U mentoring program Little Brothers and Little Sisters to shop at for family and friends.
QVC bag-o-gifts!
There's been a whole lotta buzz about this venture and you can check it all out here.

This is a link to a really cool news-story that Fox and WOAI did on the store: 
You can also read about some blogger's visits with their kids to the store:
My previous posts about the store are here:

Read more about it on the Big Brothers Big Sisters website where you can find and print a FREE GIFT WRAP COUPON!  

Also check out From Me To You on:
More pictures of the store:
The store is upstairs outside of Macy's, above Santa in Rolling Oaks Mall

Merchandise

A customer mails a letter to Santa

No comments:

Post a Comment