Health center employees donate bags of gifts to local children

FAIRFIELD – Employees at Jefferson County Health Center delivered 46 bags of toys and clothes Wednesday to local children so they would have something under their tree this Christmas.

Shelly Adkison, staff nurse in the JCHC emergency department and the health center's education coordinator, said the JCHC Community Team likes to 'adopt” kids every year by giving them Christmas presents.

SIEDA Community Action in Fairfield gathers presents for children in need. It creates paper 'mittens” that are hung from a tree, each one representing a different child.

On one side of the mitten is a list of what the child needs – coats, gloves, boots – and on the other side is a list of what they want. Members of the community take the mittens and purchase the items on them, knowing only the child's age and sex but not their name.

Adkison said the health center normally holds a bake sale each year to raise money so it can pick some of these mittens off the tree. However, that wasn't possible this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

That didn't stop the JCHC Community Team from finding another way to help. Adkison said that the team decided to host its own mitten tree at the health center.

'Our employees go over and above, especially when it comes to kids,” Adkison said.

The team thought of another way to raise money, and that was through a pop can drive. They put up fliers throughout the building informing employees where to drop off their pop cans. Adkison said members of the community even reached out to tell them they had cans they wanted to donate to the cause. Adkison's son Colton, a freshman at Fairfield High School, sorted all of the cans.

Adkison got 20 mittens to hang on the JCHC Christmas tree, but she soon realized that wouldn't be enough. In fact, they were all spoken for within just two hours. People called her asking for more, so she put up another 26 mittens, and all of those were taken, too.

Some people didn't want to go shopping, so they donated money.

Adkison said it's up to the person who takes the mitten to decide what to buy from the list, but the goal is to fulfill all of the child's needs and at least one of their wants. She said some people bought a child a toy, and their mitten was returned with the toy crossed off the list to inform the next person that the child still had needs unfulfilled. Adkison said she was happy to report that all 46 kids adopted by the Community Team had all of their needs met.

The Community Team had raised so much money that it had $2,100 left over after covering all the children's needs and one of their wants, so the team presented a check for that amount to Carol Long, program specialist serving SIEDA's Jefferson and Keokuk county offices.

Adkison mentioned that she went grocery shopping Saturday and bumped into Long, who said she had spent the entire day filling carts with gifts for children.