Freshman Prakruti Kottani is hosting a toy drive in partnership with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Toy donations can be brought to health teacher Melanie Jozokos’s room (Room 111) until the end of January, while monetary donations can be donated through a QR code (see the article’s featured image for the QR code).

In addition to donations, t-shirts are available for purchase. These shirts will say “Benefiting St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital”, and the money from purchasing them will also go straight to St. Jude’s. The goal is to raise $4,000 from the t-shirts and monetary donations, and as many toys as possible.

Some examples of toys that can be donated include dolls, action figures, puppets, fidget toys, LEGO sets, journals, and arts and craft materials. They should be new and unopened when brought into WA.

“They’ve requested it to all be unopened and neatly packaged,” Kottani said. “We want to make sure that everything is sanitized before we bring them [to the hospital].”

Kottani and a few others will be presenting these gifts to the kids at the Memphis hospital at a later, to-be-determined time.

“A group of people are going to Tennessee and visiting the center to hand-deliver the toys to the kids,” Kottani said. “I think hand-delivering them would really impact [the kids] a lot,” Kottani said.

This was all set up by Kottani. She came up with the idea, reached out to St. Jude’s, and asked the freshman student government and class officers for help with publicizing the event on the WABC announcements. She also reached out to the deans to organize a competition between homerooms to win a prize that is unknown at this time. This competition is ongoing until Wednesday, Jan 4.

In addition, donation links will be added to the town’s Friday emails so anyone living in Westford can give monetary donations. Donations from all aspects of the toy drive will be going directly to St. Jude’s.

“Any amount helps,” Kottani said. “If everyone donated, it would all add up to our goal of helping those in need.”