Hi, I'm Gwen (Wendy) Potter. I'm raising funds to buy gifts for the "Be a Santa for a Senior" community-based holiday gift drive. I started this annual drive in 2018 in Toronto, ON, Canada, running it out of the Queen W./Dufferin area.

My goal is to make the 2025 holidays a little brighter for isolated seniors and marginalized, chronically ill, disabled, or special needs persons in the southwestern Toronto communities by providing holiday gifts to recipients of the Meals on Wheels (MoW) program run out of West Neighbourhood House (Ossington/Dundas W.). Most of these men and women are over 55 and live alone.

This year, Be a Santa for a Senior aims to provide gift bags for 240 MoW recipients. To do this, I'm going to: 1) ask community members to donate individual gifts in gift bags that I'll sort and MoW will deliver; and 2) buy gift items myself using any donated funds from GoFundMe and other sources and combine these with knitted items from volunteers to put together gift bags. I’d also love donations from interested business sponsors (email me!).

This GoFundMe is to raise funds for holiday gift items (sweets, body wash, blankets, cozy socks, puzzle books, etc.), gift bags, and tissue. To have enough time to buy items (and bargain-hunt), I'm hoping to have monetary donations in ASAP, ideally by Dec. 4, but we will be accepting donations until Dec. 9 for last-minute stuff.

The wonderful West Neighbourhood House’s Meals on Wheels program brings meals to around 100 people in need each day in the southwest area of Toronto; during the holiday season, this number could reach 200+ daily. The majority of them spend the holidays alone.

Be a Santa for a Senior is a tiny volunteer initiative, so we have not been able to provide gift bags for everyone in the MoW program in years past…but we've been growing every year. In 2025, we aim to hit that 240 target with the help of anyone generous enough to help us. Every little bit counts, as does just sharing this fundraiser and following our Facebook page. Thank you in advance for reading this and for participating! ❤

Please see our Facebook page for more details and photos from past years' gift drives. We hit a record (for us) 159 gift bags last year!

Note that we're not a registered charity yet, which means we cannot issue tax receipts for donations.

Final deadline for monetary donations: Dec. 9/25. Our delivery day of fully complete gift bags to MoW is Dec. 13 (in the morning).

~ In gratitude, Gwen Potter, Be a Santa for a Senior Gift Drive Founder

https://www.facebook.com/BeASantaForASeniorGiftDrive