Hope and Friendship Foundation prepares for 20th Christmas Outreach

This past Thanksgiving Hope and Friendship Foundation assisted more households with food than in Hope and Friendship's 19 years of Thanksgiving assistance. Over this past year, founder Terri O'Neill-Borders, states that she has had more crisis need requests than often time or resources to meet them. She recently crossed paths with someone who commented “I can’t believe how your little organization has grown”. What started as a desire to create a legacy for her father, "doubling as a therapeutic busyness for the loss my kids and I were feeling, has grown into a resource of hands, feet, and hearts who know there is need, who care to meet that need, and who “do something” about it".

She shared that received a text a few nights ago from one that Hope and Friendship helped in the past. At the time they were a child in a home of crisis, one of loss of a parent. They were reminiscing about the first Christmas without that parent and how they remember a meal coming, gifts coming, and the constant presence and support for months after the loss. It made an impact that set in this friend’s heart as a child, and still today as an adult. They wanted to make sure to communicate that they haven’t, and won’t forget the healing that came from knowing a community was surrounding them.

O'Neill-Borders daily makes calls, texts, emails, trying to make sure that she has exhausted every effort to offer what can be offered to help make Christmas better for everyone, while connecting with many she shares that she has heard such struggles, such pain, such hardship of trying to provide and sustain in so many homes. The costs of food, utilities, supplies, are high for everyone, but they are smothering those that are barely getting by, or who, like her young friend, has suffered a life blow that consumes a home financially, emotionally, and physically. O'Neill-Borders feels that "the least we can do is offer something from our hands to theirs bridging the gap between those that can help and those that need it. I’m not asking for anyone to extend more than they can, but simply to offer “just one” so that it comes together to be a beautiful gift of hope and love".

O'Neill-Borders offers the challenge of offering "just one":

Just one item that could go in a Christmas Care Box stuffed with much needed basic needs (personal care items, cleaning products, paper products). Everything your home needs…these homes need.

Just one prepared dish that we can put together with other prepared dishes and create a custom Christmas Dinner for each and every home we arrive at on Christmas Day. A side dish, a dessert, potatoes, pasta, stuffing, butter, gravy, fruit, salad….whatever would sit on your table would be a perfect offering for theirs.

She shares:

"This is year #20. I’m way older than year #1.
Year #1 (2005) we sat at a table with 12.
Year #2 (2006) my kids and I delivered to 22 homes.

This year we will arrive at well over 100 homes and feed hundreds, and arrive at even more with a fully packed Care Box of much needed items, right here in our corner of the world."

O'Neill-Borders affirms that this Christmas Outreach only happens "because of the beautiful community of caring spirits who offer the place to work on this, the means to make it possible, and the hands that will extend this Christmas Gift from one friend to another. Christmas is a very special time, but the love, light, and beauty of Christmas in this corner of the world, with this unification committed to this particular outreach is truly awe inspiringly magical."

O'Neill-Borders wishes to thank the Lemont community for 20 years of making “something wonderful” possible, over, and over, and over again.
Info@hopeandfriendshipfoundation.com
www.hopeandfriendshipfoundation.com