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This year’s Holiday Helpings campaign has been a major success! Since our kickoff in November, we’ve been able to provide complete holiday meal kits — a turkey and all the trimmings — to 6,700 families. You all showed up again for us in a big way on Giving Tuesday, which allowed us to show up in a big way for DC families. Our amazing supporters donated enough to help us feed 2,884 households.

But we’re not done yet.

We need to reach another 2,300 families before Christmas and we can’t do it without your help. In order to cover the cost of each family, we need to raise another $80,000 in 18 days. Will you stand with us to meet the need?

It costs just $32 for Bread for the City to provide a family of four with a holiday meal. I know we can reach our goal of 9,000 families served by Christmas Eve, but we can’t do it alone.

The best way to help us? Host a fundraising drive and rally your friends, family, colleagues, book clubs, and social media networks to stand with you and Bread for the City. Creating your fundraiser takes just three minutes if you follow the easy steps in our drive kit.

Last month, our chairman, Paul Taskier wrote a moving post about his 22-year relationship with Holiday Helpings and how his participation impacts his life:

And it still gives me a glow to help others have a Thanksgiving at home with their families. This was driven home for me one year when one of the new employees at my firm showed up at my office with his contribution to buy a family a Thanksgiving dinner. I was touched – I knew he wasn’t making a lot of money and I thanked him for his generosity. His response stopped me in my tracks and, frankly, brought tears to my eyes. He said that when he was a child he didn’t have a Thanksgiving dinner unless his mother was able to get a turkey and the trimmings from Bread for the City. And now that he had a job, he wanted to make sure that some other family had a Thanksgiving like Bread for the City made for him.

It touched me deeply because unless you live with the daily grind of low income, you don’t process how rare all the rich experiences of our society are for its poorest members. I knew that we gave out thousands of Thanksgiving turkeys but there is a cognitive and experiential leap between giving out bags of turkeys and food, and the understanding that a family would not have dinner that holiday without that gift. That is the gift of Holiday Helpings.

As Paul said, Holiday Helpings is a gift- to those who give, to those who receive, and to those who give others the opportunity to participate. We have 18 days to reach 2,300 more families. Will you celebrate with us?

Will you help us help DC? Visit https://breadforthecity.org/holidayhelpings/ for more information.