Nearly a million Christmas stories are just beginning from a run-of-the-mill warehouse in Huntington Beach.
Operation Christmas Child wraps up its annual gift collection this month, and this year, it plans to process and ship about 900,000 shoeboxes full of Christmas presents collected from seven Western states: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Montana.
Shoeboxes from the West Coast office go to Peru, Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, said Jennifer Trevithick, regional director of the nonprofit charity.
She said her office—on MacArthur Boulevard in Santa Ana—runs year-round, then leases warehouse space between October and Christmas for the heavy lifting during the holiday season.
“We start looking in August and kind of shoot for between 80,000 to 100,000 square feet,” she said.
She said the organization leased space in Ontario last year but has been in Orange County 13 of the past 14 years and prefers to operate here because of the established base of loyal volunteers.
Orange County is one of nine regional processing centers. The others are in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, and Minneapolis, along with two in North Carolina, where its parent is based.
The two months of work in Orange County this year involved about 150 paid workers hired through Decton Staffing Services in Irvine and 18,000 volunteers.
The regional office in Santa Ana is the West Coast site of Operation Christmas Child, which is part of a larger nonprofit called Samaritan’s Purse.
Samaritan’s Purse was founded in 1970 and is run by President and Chief Executive William “Franklin” Graham III, son of evangelist Billy Graham. It had a $414 million budget in 2013, with operation sites in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and Australia, and field offices in 15 developing nations.
Samaritan’s Purse describes itself as “a nondenominational Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to victims of war, natural disasters, disease, famine, poverty and persecution in more than 100 countries.”
It says its Operation Christmas Child unit is a way to “demonstrate God’s love in a tangible way to needy children.”
Operation Christmas Child has delivered 113 million shoeboxes of gifts to more than 130 countries since 1993, according to press materials.
The group sent 9.9 million shoeboxes last year, and this year’s goal is 10 million, a spokesperson said.
The unit asks for a $7 donation per shoebox to help with processing, but not all shoeboxes come with the cash component.
Donors can track shoeboxes online to see where theirs end up.
Logistics
Shoeboxes are collected at 4,000 drop-off sites, mostly in Western countries—the U.S, Australia, New Zealand, and several European nations—and processed by more than 500,000 volunteers.
Most of the work happens during the last two months of the year, but shoeboxes can also be “packed,” or ordered online, year-round if the giver prefers the charity handle the filling of the box.
Trevithick said the Santa Ana warehouse runs on two shifts of about 450 volunteers each; volunteers can work for as little as an hour. They check the donated shoeboxes and remove items that can “melt, spill or break,” Trevithick said, and to make sure they don’t contain anything used or damaged, or have war-related items such as toy guns or knives.
Perishable food items, liquids, and medication or vitamins are also removed, as well as aerosol cans.
Shoeboxes are repacked, taped shut and placed in cartons, then stacked onto pallets for shipping overseas, she said. Not all boxes arrive at their destinations by Christmas.
The Santa Ana office has been Operation Christmas Child’s local base for 15 years and is manned by five full-time staffers and one part-timer. Trevithick has headed it for the past five years.
The organization works with a number of schools and churches and the OC locations of several national restaurant chains, including College Park, Ga.-based Chick-fil-A, Panera Bread in Kirkwood, Mo., and Dublin, Ohio-based Wendy’s.
In a statement provided for this story, Franklin Graham expressed gratitude for the “local volunteers who offer their time and support” to send “simple shoebox gift(s)” around the world.
