Every toy we collect is given by someone who wants a child in our community to have something to open on Christmas morning. Together, our community has turned a small neighborhood toy drive into a Bay Area tradition.
Nonprofits, schools, shelters, churches, and social service agencies across the Bay Area distribute our toys directly to the children and families they work with all year.
Love Never Fails
Since 2012, this tradition has grown through the generosity of the people who choose to take part each year.
At age seven, after learning from his grandmother that a local toy ministry in San Jose had run out of gifts for waiting families, Joey Childs decorated a cardboard moving box and walked his neighborhood with handmade flyers. After collecting a handful of toys in 2012 and 2013, Joey's neighborhood collection grew to 150 toys by 2015.
Walking street by street after school, Joey welcomed the first supporting schools and local businesses in 2016 (275 toys) and crossed the 1,000-toy mark for the first time in 2017 (1,045 toys). Even through the 2020 pandemic winter, Joey's Toy Drive never missed a season, reaching 6,442 toys by its tenth year in 2022.
In 2023, Joey brought together a dedicated volunteer team of close friends and grew the Host a Toy Drive program, collecting 12,800 toys that season. The program kept growing in 2024 as more schools and workplaces hosted toy drives of their own.
In our fourteenth season, more businesses, schools, and community groups hosted toy drives than ever before, joined by thousands of individual donors, to support local nonprofits, schools, shelters, and family service organizations.
Our partners are the businesses and schools that take the initiative to host their own toy drives. Our volunteers generously give their time to collect, organize, and distribute these donations. It is through this collective action that Joey's Toy Drive is able to fulfill its mission of ensuring no child is left without a toy.
100% Volunteer-Run
Every step of Joey's Toy Drive is carried out by volunteers, and no one at the organization draws a salary. Students, parents, retirees, and workplace teams give their evenings and weekends each November and December to assemble boxes, unpack donations, and prepare gifts for every age group.
Because local companies and volunteers donate the space, vehicles, and hours needed to run Joey's Toy Drive, our entire effort can go toward putting a new gift into the hands of a child on Christmas morning.
