As the holiday season approaches, the Parkway Students in Transition Office, which specializes in helping displaced Parkway families, is launching it’s annual seasons giving event called the Adopt-A-Family project.

“The Adopt-A-Family project is a way to get families in need the help that they need this holiday season,”Alyssa Herrera, project supervisor said. “We connect people with families who have been displaced from their homes that need to spend their money on other essentials. It takes away the stress of the holidays while providing them with items they need for the season.”

The adopt-a-family project was inspired by a secret santa gift giving within the office.

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“Our office used to do a fun staff thing where we’d buy gifts for each other through the week before the holidays. In one of our meetings, rather than giving each other gifts, a staff member suggested that we help out families in transition,” Herrera said. “We connected and reached out to administration about helping families and doing things like drives. We recognize that there are a lot of displaced families in the area, and we decided to start this project to help our parkway family.”

The Students in Transitions office provide numerous ways for individuals and groups to adopt families.

“Groups of people, students and teachers can chose to ‘adopt’ a family and provide gifts and such for them that the family requests.  There are families of various sizes, small and large, if some people can’t support larger scale families. Some people can even adopt a single person, and if we get all those people together as a group, together they can end up adopting a whole family together.”

For those unable to Adopt-A-Family and would like to assist the project in an alternate way, there are other available options.

“If people would rather do things like drives, like sock drives or clothes drives, we also accept that help to. We can take the donated items and give them to the families that need them. So there’s a really wide variety of ways to help out the displaced families.”

Herrera and those in the students in Transitions office hope for a great turnout and appreciate all help from those interested.

“In the years that we’ve done this project, there’s been such a great response. This year we have up to 30 displaced families we are going to be able to help so far,” Herrera said. “That’s more than half of the families that we have that need help this season.”

If you are interested in assisting contact the Parkway Students in Transition Office at 314-415-5068 or [email protected].