Activity #1 - Giving Back - It's not all about us!

Club TAOS officially kicked-off with a feel-good activity scheduled two weeks before Christmas. We gathered at Reston Interfaith www.restoninterfaith.org to sort holiday gifts for the Adopt-a-Family gift drive. Each year, Reston Interfaith works with community members to make the holiday season fulfilling and memorable for our neighbors in need. The Adopt-a-Family gift drive in December ensures that families are well-fed and children receive personalized gifts.

The 2009 drive signed up record numbers of families in need, and also received the most donations to date in the history of Reston Interfaith's drives. We wanted to be a part of this community service project and our help was surely needed! There were more than 1,800 gifts to be sorted and distributed to children and their families and senior citizens in the area.

Upon arriving, we were giving a fairly lengthy set of instructions (a little annoying - who knew gift sorting was so complicated?) and placed in a room crowded with trash bags full of presents. We were a little overwhelmed - there was obviously a lot to be done... and we quickly realized that our two hours of volunteer time would not even put a dent in this project! Nonetheless, we jumped right in working mostly independently in an attempt to cover more territory. Our tasks involved tearing off wrapping paper, analyzing gifts for age and gender appropriateness, estimating the value of each gift, cross-referencing the gifts to the list of "adopted" children and families, highlighting spreadsheets, re-bagging gifts in new trash bags, labeling them with the adopted family's assigned number, and finally depositing "our work" in the designated spot within Reston Interfaith's office space.

If it sounds like a lot to do... it was... and after a little more than two hours, we felt pretty good about what we had accomplished "something", but were somewhat deflated that we hadn't done "enough" and didn't leave with the "feel good" in our hearts that we anticipated. Let's face it... it really was work and it wasn't exactly fun. While we tried to imagine how these children would look when they received the gifts we had "inspected" for them, we didn't get to see that child's face light up with joy - and THAT would have been much more satisfying. Still, we reflected on the experience while eating lunch at a bakery down the street and patted ourselves on the back for doing something for others during this "busy time." We said our good-byes as we headed off in separate directions - no doubt running errands and tending to our own mundane list of "to dos" and "to buys"... 'tis the season!