This week, the director of West Marin Community Services’ Resource Center, Socorro Romo, began rolling out empty barrels and setting them in front of the Palace Market in hopes of filling them with donated toys and food for West Marin’s needy kids and their families.
Local donations are even more critical this year as the resource center, a program of West Marin Community Services, must do without support from the Salvation Army, which historically has provided enough food and toys to bring holiday cheer to around 150 kids.
The center dropped the national donations workhorse as its major contributor to the annual West Marin Holiday Food and Gift Program after diminishing communications between the two parties finally disintegrated earlier this month. That loss follows the departure of the Marin Food Bank, which two years ago merged with the San Francisco Food Bank and pulled out of West Marin.
“There are a lot of people who say, ‘Without you, we wouldn’t have been able to buy anything,’” said Wendy Friefeld, the executive director of W.M.C.S. “We knew it would be a huge amount of work the first year to find sources to replace all that. But we’ve formed a committee of people from the schools and the libraries and some other people [who are also] helping.”
The Salvation Army could not be reached for comment.
According to Ms. Romo, the Salvation Army had hinted for the past couple of years that it might not continue supporting West Marin. The change in tone, Ms. Romo said, occurred shortly after a personnel shake up that ended longstanding relationships between her and former liaisons at the Salvation Army.
In recent years, the Salvation Army had been waiting until the very last minute to confirm with West Marin that it would send the required individual applications for beneficiary families so they could receive food and toys—a problem, considering the application’s detailed, complicated background-check procedure and the geographic isolation many poor families experience across West Marin.
Last year, community services only signed up 35 families due to the time constraint, though historically the group has assisted 65 or more families. And that number would have been far fewer, had the California Highway Patrol not stepped in to help with toy donations.
That C.H.P. support will return this year, along with gifts from local businesses, organizations and private individuals. But Ms. Romo estimates the center needs $5,000 to make up the loss of the Salvation Army’s contribution, which has long brought around 450 toys and 100 25-pound boxes of food to West Marin.
Though the center believes it is possible to reach even more than the usual 150 kids this year, the uncertainty has set Ms. Romo on edge.
“It’s a little stressful because we don’t know,” Ms. Romo said. “But we’re doing whatever it takes to make it happen.”
This week, she and the group drafted a simplified version of the application for recipient families, one that eliminates the Salvation Army’s requirement to include a photocopy of a driver’s license or other valid I.D. Instead, that information can be gleaned from records kept at Shoreline Unified School District, which serves most of the kids from low-income families who receive free food and toys. And if families do not have children enrolled in Shoreline, they can still complete the application by providing proof through a utilities or phone bill that they reside in West Marin.
With the new application, Ms. Romo intends to work with several local nonprofits to reach even more kids from Bodega Bay down to Stinson Beach. In all, she and her group would like to reach 200 kids this year.
Anyone interested in donating to the West Marin Holiday Food and Gift Program may do so online at http://www.westmarincommunityservices.org/ways-to-give or by mail at P.O. Box 1093, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956.