Treehut makes its home within the diverse, culturally rich Bay Area community. We understand how fortunate we are to create, ship, and do business right here in San Francisco. That is why we feel the need to give back. When Family House, a San Francisco non-profit located right around the corner contacted us, we were more than happy to get to know our neighbors: people who make a very real, direct impact in our communities, with ripple effects.
Family House San Francisco describes themselves as "a home away from home for families of children with life-threatening illnesses receiving treatment at The UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital." As an organization that provides comfort and hope to youth facing family hardship, they have been known to collaborate with a number of local businesses to provide toys and gifts all year long. This past season, they were worried about not having enough age-appropriate gifts to distribute to older, teenaged kids.
Our answer was simple: Yes.
On a recent San Francisco morning, Treehut team member and marketing coordinator Cody took a trip around the block to drop off a special batch of our wooden watches to the teens at Family House. He was met by Alison Blom, Development Associate at Family House, who spent some time acquainting him with their daily work.
Every child at Family House walks in through tall glass doors into a warm lobby often punctuated by panting therapy dogs in the play area. As they are greeted and become acclimated to a new and stressful environment, they walk down a tan tiled hallway to a room known affectionately as Fozzy's Toy Room.
The toy room is where every child that comes through the doors at Family House gets to pick out a toy of their choice for their stay at Family house.
The room overflows with toys, board games, stuffed animals, coloring books, arts and crafts--anything a kid could want! Treehut was proud to contribute a mix of watches and sunglasses to an already spectacular toy room.
"The older kids will enjoy the watches," Alison said, noting that teenage gifts were hard to come by.
"It is such a turbulent time," she continued, speaking of their circumstances. "Our goal is to give them a little bit of normalcy, a bit of home while they are here."
For a place that does so much, we were happy to do even just a little at the beginning of our outreach program to begin building bridges within our community.
We are beyond thankful for the work of our dedicated neighbors at Family House. For more information on what you can do to help visit the Family House website at http://familyhouseinc.org/
