Thank you for your support for our annual Adopt-a-Family project!  Pima has been doing this project for 20+ years and generally adopts 50-75 Scottsdale children each holiday season.  

The Adopt-a-Family event is a partnership between City of Scottsdale and Scottsdale Community Partners, the non-profit philanthropy arm of COS. Families are interviewed by social workers, who record children’s requests for three gifts for the holiday as well as clothing and shoe sizes.  Susan Vargas matches up adopters and adoptees and emails assignments and full information in mid-November.  Every effort is made to match troops with a child near their age.  

Then, we purchase at least three gifts of around $100 in total value for each recipient based on their wish list.  We also provide a gift certificate for $30 to the family’s grocery store to help provide a holiday meal.  Troops frequently supplement the three main gifts with clothing, stocking stuffers, or other items, and sometimes also include a small gift for the mom or parents.  Many troops also include gift wrap, bows, and tape for the families to wrap the gifts with. All gifts are given to the families unwrapped, so the parents can have the pleasure and dignity of wrapping their own children’s gift.  

Normally, it takes two or more troops to sponsor all the children in each family.  This year, for the first time, we will ask the troops to work together to deliver all the gifts for a family together at one time to Vista del Camino (rather than taking them to Holly's house as in the past). We drop off a donor report and all the gifts, bagged and labelled for each recipient in mid-December to Vista del Camino.  Thank you for making a child's holiday special!