The Yolo County Children’s Alliance celebrates its 10th annual giveaway event
The Yolo County Children’s Alliance (YCCA) held its 10th Annual West Sacramento Giveaway Day at Westfield Village Elementary School in West Sacramento on Nov. 19. In addition to the items that were given away to families in need, the spirit of giving brought the Yolo County community together
YCCA is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to offering support services to families, addressing community concerns and gathering information on the well-being of families in Yolo County, which includes Davis, Woodland, Clarksburg, West Sacramento and Capay.
This year marked the 10th anniversary of the YCCA’s Annual Giveaway Day and would not have been possible without the assistance or funding from the entire community. Katie Villegas, executive director of the Yolo County Children’s Alliance, believes that YCCA goes above and beyond with this kind of distribution.
“We do the food distribution, we do coats and blankets, household items and toys for kids. We extended our food distribution to include all of that. We usually raise 10,000 dollars for the event and serve about 500 families,” Villegas said
With the winter season fast approaching, YCCA made it this year’s goal to extend the number of coats that are donated.
“We realized that there are a lot of kids without coats in West Sacramento,” Villegas said. “It was a big deal. We had limited the distribution to two per family before and this year we went up to three. We definitely ran out of coats. We had a lot of donations — we probably had more than 15,000 coats and we ran out so it went really fast.”
For next year, the YCCA seeks to build upon this year’s accomplishments. Special projects manager, Julie Beckner concludes that one improvement that could be made for next year is the number of families that the YCCA is able to serve.
“We were limited in how many families we were able to serve and the capacity in which we were able to serve them by the amount of money we had to buy the goods […] As always, more money means more capacity to help,” Beckner said.
Villegas said that community should get involved in order to help those in need, and also because the event itself is enjoyable for people of all ages.
“We love when people volunteer,” Villegas said. “Last year we had so many people volunteer, we had to go to an online registration […] This year we limited it to 16 and above, just because it is kind of hard with so many families coming through to have the younger kids there […] But I say if people want to volunteer for next year, to sign up early. They can follow us on Facebook or they can look at our [YCCA] website. We begin recruiting volunteers anywhere from six weeks to two months in advance and we fill up.”
Written By: Dianna Rivera – city@theaggie.org
