South Trail Fire Department delivers toys to the community

This holiday season, it’s even tougher on families financially than usual. So the South Trail Fire Department decided to help out families with a toy drive.

A trailer, a pickup truck and a fire truck were needed to pickup the thousands of toys they collected.

Kelly Wesoloski organized the toy drive. “For the past two years we’ve done a Halloween party and this year I asked all of our friends to bring a gift for a child. And that’s how we started,” she said.

Now, there are toys filling her living room. “Every steak night, every Sunday funday, you know only brought a side dish or brought money towards the steak dinner, you had to bring a toy, or toys, or money for me to go shopping,” Wesoloski said.

The idea behind collecting all of these toys was so she could give them to kids for Christmas. But she hadn’t planned the logistics of doing so. “It went off in my brain! ‘hello! My son is a firefighter!’ So I texted Jonathan and he responded back that yes, they will be doing a toy drive,” she said.

Amy Bollen is the public information officer for South Trail Fire District. “It became one big ‘us’ and they gathered so many toys that immediately we had to get to work to find homes and families that needed that,” said Bollen.

South Trail Fire says that in just tone year they were able to more than double the number of families that receive toys. They’ve identified at least eight different organizations that the toys will be delivered to on Christmas Day.