For 45 years, the Grand Monadnock Rotary Club has organized the Peterborough area’s Operation Santa program. The club partners with local social service agencies and schools to identify families who need help providing holiday gifts and essential items for children and teens.
“Each child or teen can request one fun gift and one practical gift,” said Bob MacDonald of the Grand Monadnock Rotary Club.
Each year, about 400 cards listing requests are posted around Peterborough, including at senior living facilities, large employers and local businesses. Community members can take a card, purchase the gifts and return them to the same location by Dec. 1.
“It’s quite an operation, coding the cards, making sure we put out two cards for each child, tallying it all up, matching the gift to the cards,” said Bob MacDonald, historian and past president of Grand Monadnock Rotary Club.
MacDonald said that after all the gifts are handed in, Rotary volunteers go through and check off everything on the list to find out if there are any gaps.
The community typically donates $10,000 to $15,000 in gifts. Rotary members cover whatever remains.
“We make up for the gaps, for the gifts that weren’t purchased, which typically adds up to about $4,000,” MacDonald said.
MacDonald said that in 1997, when he was president, the club had an “incredible windfall” thanks to the generosity of the students at Mountain Shadows School.
“Every year, the students do a Read-a-Thon, and they chose to donate the funds to Operation Santa so they could help other local children,” MacDonald said. “We had budgeted about $3,000 to cover the gifts that had not been purchased by the public, and then Mountain Shadows presented us with a check for about that same amount, and were were just so grateful. They have been doing it ever since.”
Casey Jones, assistant head of school at Mountain Shadows School, said the Dublin-based independent K-8 school has donated a total of $92,000 to Grand Monadnock Rotary over the past 30 years.
“When we first started participating in Operation Santa years and years ago, we asked parents to just take names and donate gifts. As time went on, in speaking with Rotary, we became aware that they had a greater need then what we had been doing, and we started thinking about how we could raise more funds,” Jones said.
The school came up with the idea of a “Read-a-Thon” in which students find sponsors for a three-week reading marathon between Thanksgiving week and December break.
“We liked the idea of the kids actively participating in the fundraiser and helping local children, we liked that it involved their families and friends as well as the wider community, and of course, we loved that it supported the students’ reading skills,” Jones said. “It was a great combination.”
Each year, Mountain Shadows students ask friends and family to sponsor them for reading by the book or by the page, and when they complete a book, they report to the office and give a short book report and log in their total pages.
According to Jones, in 1996, the first year of Read-a-Thon, the school raised $2,473.
“We typically raise about $3,500 a year,” Jones said. “And every year, members of the Rotary come to our spring Field Day and serve ice cream to kids.”
Operation Santa also provides gifts for students at Crotched Mountain School.
“Our members buy most of those; it is just hard to explain on the card why those children might need something that doesn’t seem like it fits with their age because of the special needs that they may have,” MacDonald said.
For information about Operation Santa, visit grandmonadnockrotary.org/stories.