IF OPERATION SANTA IS NOT OFFERED IN YOUR CITY

OTHER GREAT WAYS TO BE AN ELF

• Call a local orphanage in your city and ask for the Director. Orphans need toys at Christmas, too. Get out your Yellow Pages or search online!

• Many elderly people ache with loneliness and sadness during the holidays. About 4 million US seniors live in poverty, and more live as frail or homebound shut-ins. In Philadelphia, Aid for Friends has mobilized about 250 local churches and 16,000 Inter-faith volunteers to assist elderly people in need, but few other cities have faith-based, senior-serving networks which are comparable in scope.
  
  You can change this. Make December a special month for remembering the aged, who are disabled or impoverished. Visit AidForFriends.org and spearhead a similar organization to organize churches in your city. Map out local elder care centers and retirement homes.
  
  Volunteer to visit, drive them, prepare meals, perform handyman duties, donate bathtub grab-bars or toiletries, or make a donation to others who do.
  
  Ask children to craft greeting cards, assemble food kits, or make supervised home or hospital visits.
  
  Organize churches of all denominations in your community to come together and start an organization like Aid For Friends in your city.
  
  (Based on "Rethink Christmas", by John J. JDilulio and John M. Bridgeland, TIME, September 22, 2008).
  

• Some local churches have programs to drop off presents at inner-city elementary schools.
  
  
  
  
  
• The Salvation Army needs volunteers.

  
  
  
  
  
• An organization that hand delivers delivers gifts to children in the name of an incarcerated parent is the Prison Fellowship Ministries' Angel Tree program. This group is supported by a national church network.
  
  
  
  
• Tell your friends about our group. Feel free to use our suggested draft of a short message to tell friends about us.
  
  

• If you can't go to the post office yourself, please Donate Online to Be An Elf. You may also Give by Check.
  

• Check with a homeless shelter. Homeless people need things too; again, talk to the Director.

• Be An Elf hopes to work with the USPS starting in 2009 to develop new software which will allow the Postal Service to remove children's addresses and post thousands of letters from low income children online, perhaps at this website. When a volunteer clicks on "Send a gift", a shipping label with a barcode would be printed out with no address. Only post office scanners could decipher the barcode and then deliver the gift, perhaps even with no postage needed.

  Your gift will help us develop new software to protect children's privacy.
  
  Donations online are tax-deductible, and may be made anonymously.

• Please donate now!