It’s Christmas time and there’s plenty of deck-the-halls joy going on around our country, but more families than ever are missing out on festive fun as the cost-of-living crisis forces more families into severe hardship. The Kindness Collective are helping bring festive toys and food to families in need of some joy, so Capsule went along to the opening day of The Christmas Joy Store to find out more about the one thing you can do to spread festive joy this year.
Welcome to The One Thing! Every week we’re bringing you the one nugget of info that you need to know or didn’t know you needed to know! Whether it’s a tip to make your life a little easier, a pearl of wisdom, something to make you think, or maybe something to make you laugh, The One Thing is here to serve you every Friday!
If you’ve got a suggestion or submission for The One Thing – maybe something about the industry you work in that you think others should know! – please send your thoughts to alice@capsulenz.com. We’d love to hear from you!
“Our job is to create a safe space for everyone that comes through those doors,” says Kindness Collective CEO Sarah Page, as she welcomes the volunteer team for the briefing before the Christmas Joy Store opens.
As she tells the volunteers – including Capsule – what to expect and how to be helpful, she confirms the central kaupapa of the store: to help people pick out Christmas presents and food for their families, for those who wouldn’t be able to afford to do so without the Joy Store. “We are giving people the dignity of choice,” Sarah explains of the store’s set-up, which is designed like a particularly festive Christmas shop.
At 10am, the doors open and the first of the families come in. The Christmas Joy Store is a special seasonal pop-up that runs every year by Kindness Collective, a charity that helps people in need get resources they require. Necessities like food and clothing, and also necessities like joy. Because, as Sarah will tell you, everybody deserves joy. And like most things, it is in short supply for the people who need it most.
Every day, between 150 to 200 whānau come through the doors of the Christmas Joy Store, with around 450 to 600 kids shopped for each day. By Christmas, over 4000 families will have visited. The waiting list is thousands of people long, because this has been a hard year for so many people and the need is greater than ever. The shelves are full at the start of every session, but they will be bordering on empty and needing to be restocked by the time the Kindness Collective team close-up at night. This is why donating is so important – the Christmas Joy Store needs donations to keep the shelves stocked.
The morning Capsule worked there, we got to see in person the work that Sarah and the Kindness Collective team put in and how beautiful this concept is. The Christmas Cheer-O-Meter is off the charts as family after family come through the door to pick out brand-new toys and food for their children.
The people visiting the store are having, as Sarah puts it, the worst months or years of their lives. The things that so many of us take for granted – not just food on the table but festive food for that, having presents under the Christmas tree, having a Christmas tree, none of those are realities for these families.
Christmas exists all around them, but they don’t get to take part – and neither do their kids. And we are currently under a government that would give Ebenezer Scrooge a run for his money in punishing the poor for being poor, so a festive miracle is needed.
This is where the Kindness Collective come in – the Christmas Joy store is in Auckland, but there are other initiatives lead by KC happening around the country and you can help by donating to the cause here, or dropping new, unwrapped toys into your nearest Mitre 10.
The world can feel a bit hopeless right now and it can be hard to know where to start when there is so much need. All of us are feeling the pinch this Christmas – the food prices are astronomical, and a weekly food shop can feel, $$$ wise, like the big Christmas shop as it is.
But for every family who are managing to get by, there are so many that aren’t. Giving a child a toy this Christmas doesn’t solve world poverty, and it doesn’t bring around world peace. But it does make a tangible difference to one family’s life, and it reminds them that there is magic and kindness in the world. What could be more a more joyful use of your $20 or $50 than that?
