Helping Families Have A Healthy Holiday Season

My blog is a little late this time, due to Oklahoma weather causing several asthma attacks on me last week. As I started to think about this blog, it made me realize what great things my client, CCFI does for children and families. I thought about how lucky I am to have the ability to see a doctor when I am not feeling well. So many families in the Norman community do not have the capabilities to go to the doctor when they or their family member is feeling sick. Many families simply do not have enough money to do this and they must choose between taking their child to the doctor or having enough money to pay for childcare that month. The Center for Children and Families is helping to make this an easier choice for these families.

CCFI has implemented several programs for underprivileged families making their lives a little easier. Something as simple as an after school program, where parents can send their children and know that they are safe after school while their parents work, shows that a little help can go a long way. After attending the official tour of CCFI, where I learned more about their organization, I now understand why people would want to work for a non-profit. Before, I never thought I could see myself working at a non-profit and now I do not understand why I wouldn’t want to work at a place like CCFI. The work that they are doing is touching so many lives for the better each day. Seeing a child and parent play together for the first time or see a troubled parent turn their path around and decide to get help would be some of the most rewarding work.

My group has struggled with what we could possibly do for our client, CCFI. We have gone back and forth between our contact at CCFI, Whitney Russell, who is in charge of communications there, and Dr. Carstarphen. For about the first 8 weeks of class it seemed like we could not catch a break. We would come up with what we thought was a brilliant idea for our campaign with CCFI, only to find out that they already had something like that being done or to find out that our idea would not work for this class. Talk about frustrating! It was only yesterday we finally got it set in stone what we will do for our event. Not only are we incredibly behind the other groups, but we all have so much work to do for other classes during midterms. I believe our group will be able to pull of a fantastic event for CCFI.

We plan to hold our own event inside of one of their events. During the annual CCFI Christmas Open House, we will hold a diaper drive. I believe this will be very successful seeing that we have a very influential minister helping us to promote the diaper drive. Jim Burns, who is a member of the Ministerial Alliance, and also on the Board of Directors at CCFI will announce our event at the monthly Ministerial Alliance meeting. The purpose of this is for him to get the other members to announce the diaper drive to their congregations. We will provide the information that Jim Burns will say as well as the information for each member to say when they announce the event. We are going to have a short story for them to tell their congregation about how badly CCFI needs their help and hopefully this will persuade them to bring donations.

My own personal goal for this campaign is that providing diapers to families in need will allow for them to have the resources needed to keep their family healthy this holiday season.