DARIEN – A woman who owned a business in Peru was forced to uproot her family recently because she had witnessed extortion of neighboring business and knew she was no longer safe. The woman and her family completed the long trek to America over the Mexican border.
“She made it across the border and made it to Stamford,” said Nancy Coughlin, CEO of Person to Person (P2P), a Darien-based nonprofit that has provided food and clothing to the needy since 1968. “She was four months pregnant when she crossed. She has two older children. They are all now living in one room.”
That family is one of a new cohort of area residents who have been invited to “shop” at P2P’s annual Holiday Toy Store on the St. Luke’s Church campus at 1864 Post Road.
“(The Peruvian woman’s family) knows that when they come here, her kids will have toys in their first Christmas here,” Coughlin said. “This year, we have some new families that have recently arrived. We have a very significant population of new arrivals that stick out.”
Those families are one of the nearly 800 that fulfilled Christmas wishes for about 1,800 children Dec. 12-14 at the 49th annual P2P Holiday Toy Store located at the Anderson Youth and Community Center on the St. Luke’s campus. P2P’s offices and headquarters are also there.
“Everything is donated,” Coughlin said. “Some people will do toy donations from toy drives. Some donate funds. We even have an Amazon wish list and people can donate on our website (LINK HERE). You can purchase through Darien Toy Box and they give us the toys.”
Parents are able to spend time shopping among the donated gifts, which include board games, stuffed animals, books, gift cards, and puzzles, to name a few.
Most of the people in the Darien, Stamford and Norwalk communities have been taking part in the toy store for years. And just like previous years, P2P invites local and state officials to take part in a ribbon-cutting to kick it off. This year they included Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling, Darien First Selectman Jon Zagrodzky, state Sen. Ceci Maher (former head of P2P), and state Reps. Corey Paris, Travis Simms, Lucy Dathan and Rachel Khanna.
“We used to do a gift tag where people could adopt a family,” Coughlin said. “We don’t do that because there are too many families to manage in three days. It’s a lot of work getting it all set up. But it’s fun. Every year, we worry we don’t have enough, but everything gets delivered and we have enough.”
The annual event is made possible with the help of nearly 400 volunteers and major sponsors: Holiday Toy Store include M&T Bank, Darien Toy Box and Lush Cosmetics SoNo Collection.
“We could have not done this without the generous support of the community,” said Juri Garone, P2P’s chief community relations officer. “And when I say community, I mean community. Private, work groups, civic groups.”
M&T Bank, which has a branch in the Good Wives Plaza, provided volunteers to help out at the toy store.
“We were originally doing sponsorships when we were People’s United Bank and now through M&T we have continued that tradition,” said Mike Riina, M&T branch manager. “M&T gives employees 40 volunteer hours so we can provide some manpower to help with the community, like this. We have four employees coming tomorrow (Dec. 13) to be elves and helping the families pick their toys.”
P2P’s history dates back to the assassination of civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
“In 1968, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, the director of St. Luke’s parish here in Darien (Rev. Dr. Robert Nelson Back) and Dr. King were in seminary together,” Coughlin said. “So, he got a group of parishioners together and said this terrible thing happened and we want to have a response from the community and a way for people to heal. That’s how Person to Person was formed.”
