AUSTIN, Texas — Over 8,000 children involved in the foster care system across 31 counties in Central and South-Central Texas will wake up on Christmas morning with a gift they specifically asked for.
The annual Holiday Wishes program is coordinated through the nonprofit Partnerships for Children, which helps advocate for children in the area and help them feel supported year-round through various resources.
Some familiar faces – including Texas Longhorns football star Arch Manning – were spotted helping out at the Holiday Wishes workshop this week. Hundreds of volunteers have helped to shop, coordinate and sort the gifts to hand them off to caseworkers by Christmas.
The gifts are split up by counties and shipped off in phases. Reading through the list, you can see exactly why each child asked for each gift.
"One teen boy asked for a lawnmower in order to help his family look after the house, which was really sweet to see," Program Director Susana Martinez said.
With years of experience as an investigator with Child Protective Services (CPS) and now as the program director for Partnerships for Children, Martinez said it's important to make sure these children don't feel left out from their peers and classmates this time of year.
"The holidays look very different for children that are connected to CPS and foster care. They might not be home with their families. They might be in a foster home, they might have just gone through a particular crisis with their family. And so, it's already such a challenging time for them, that when you add the holidays onto it, it's really important that they don't feel alone, [that] they don't feel as though they aren't seen and cared for," Martinez said.
She said Partnerships for Children is still making last-minute gift additions for names that have been added, and the nonprofit is still taking monetary donations. Learn more about getting involved with Holiday Wishes.
KVUE launched the Forever Families segment with Partnerships for Children (PFC) in June 2020 to highlight children in the Heart Gallery of Central Texas who need secure and permanent families. Every day, there are nearly 1,000 children waiting to get adopted in Central Texas, according to PFC.
Editor's note: The children who are in the Heart Gallery program and featured in KVUE's Forever Families segments are children who have had every effort made on their behalf to connect them with family or others in their community to provide options for permanent, adoptive homes. Through no fault of their own, that hasn’t happened yet, and so in partnership with the Department of Family and Protective Services, we collaborate to bring awareness to KVUE viewers about these children in the hopes of finding them permanency before they age out.