Children's parties can benefit social-service groups

By Stephanie Dunnewind
Seattle Times staff reporter

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sitting back-to-back, 5-year-olds Sally Walker, left, and Sophie Gagnaire check out gifts from their birthday party. The presents will be donated to charity.

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The haul from Sophie Gagnaire and Sally Walker's joint fifth birthday party included dress-up clothes, art supplies, clothes, books, games and dolls.

Sorting through the presents, the girls held up a Snow White costume to see how it might look and exclaimed over picture books that matched ones they had at home. Then they turned all the unwrapped gifts over to the Baby Boutique, which serves homeless families.

"You can see our toy shelves have gotten a little bare," said Sandy Lowe, vice president of community-based services for Family Services. The Boutique, which runs on community donations, allows homeless families to choose clothing items, toys, diapers, toiletries and books from a shoplike setting downtown. "Parents are interested in the functional, but kids are going to love this."

For middle-class parents who cringe at the gift-opening frenzy but don't want to give up whole-class parties, charity-birthday parties let kids help kids — and get a little dose of awareness too.

"More and more people are looking at these kinds of activities to encourage their children to be philanthropists," said Susan Crites Price, author of "The Giving Family: Raising Our Children to Help Others." Parents see it as a small way to counter American culture's pervasive commercialism, she said.

	Sophie Gagnaire, left, and Sally Walker run to Baby Boutique with gifts in hand.

The Brighter Birthday Club, started by a Seattle teen and her mom, helped the girls link up with Family Services. "It's a good thing for kids to do because they feel like they're making a difference," said Alison Alhadeff, 16, who started donating birthday gifts at age 8 and helped create the club as part of a bat mitzvah-service project. "It feels good for everyone at the party ... "

Brighter Birthday facilitates birthday donations to six social-service agencies. One of them, YouthCare, uses donations to provide birthday presents for homeless teens. "If a youth knows that the person who had a birthday party chose him, that makes it even more special," said Kristin Bolken, director of development.

Some do-gooders work directly with their charity of choice. Children's birthday-party donations to The Humane Society for Seattle/King County "happen quite frequently throughout the year," said Greg Golliver, manager of fund development. "It's amazing how much can be generated from a birthday party."

Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center has received approximately $28,000 from its Peter Pan Birthday Club since its 2001 inception, said spokesman Daniel Mullen. The club offers children a format for asking guests to bring donations to benefit Children's injury-prevention efforts.

With Sally and Sophie, both sets of parents hoped to avoid gift overload for their third shared party. The girls attend The French Immersion School of Washington in Bellevue, where the entire class is often invited to birthdays. That's a potential 20 gifts on top of the bounty from grandparents and relatives.

"You watch kids ripping through their presents and all the parents have this look that something is not quite sitting right," said Sophie's mom, Kirsten Gagnaire.

She attended one party with so many kids the guests had to take numbers and line up to present their gifts. "It was literally a madhouse," she said.

To make the donation more concrete for the girls, they visited Baby Boutique and did some volunteer work before the party.

"We wanted to make sure this wasn't just our idea," said Sally's mom, Crista Walker. "I didn't want her to say, 'My fifth birthday was the worst I ever had because they gave all my gifts away.' It was either within them or it just wasn't for this year."

Helping sort clothes and seeing families come in to Baby Boutique helped Sally "embrace the idea," Walker said. "Sally at first lobbied to keep a few gifts from the party, then she went to Baby Boutique and decided that everything should go to Family Services."

The girls focused on the excitement of the celebration since "at this age, it's way more about the party than the presents," Gagnaire said.

Any occasion where children receive gifts, including holidays and bat or bar mitzvahs, are opportunities to open a conversation about giving, Price noted. Even young kids "can understand the idea of giving to others who don't have as much," she said. "The earlier you start, the more a habit will be instilled."

The girls' parents hope their discussions help the kindergartners understand "there are kids out there who don't have the same things," Gagnaire said. It seems to be working: When her school collected coins for a local food bank, Sophie told her mom she was going to give all her coins away, just like she did with her birthday presents.

Adults come with all sorts of philosophical and moral reasons for giving, but for kids, it's pretty simple.

Why did the girls want to donate their presents?

"To be nice," said Sally. "For children who don't have any toys," added Sophie.

"And what would it be like not to have toys?" prompted Walker.

"It would be sad, because they wouldn't have anything to play with," Sophie said.

"And what do you think they'll be when they see the toys up on the shelf?"

"Happy." sdunnewind@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2091.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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