Hope for the Holidays is a Fresno City College program that works to serve students in need for the holiday season by giving students a $50 Save Mart gift card. This 36-year-long tradition put on by the Student Activities Center has helped thousands of students throughout the years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The amount of gift cards given out this year was unclear, but it typically ranges from 180-350 students depending on the amount of donations received, according to Janice Wong, a senior program specialist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Staff on the FCC campus receive an email in the beginning of October to nominate students. Students who are nominated enter a lottery system to receive the gift card on Dec. 4. Each student was allowed 10 nominations and those chosen will receive emails saying they were selected.<\/p>\n
\u201cSelection happens by faculty and staff, they will actually nominate students who they feel would benefit from the Hope for the Holidays program,\u201d Wong said.<\/p>\n
Paul Torres, a senior program specialist, works in the Student Activities Center to put on events to boost student engagement. He is one of the leaders this year for the program. When he went to FCC in the 2000s, he was a student worker at the activities center and has seen the program\u2019s growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIts not just one office, it\u2019s a campus-wide event that we do,\u201d Torres said. \u201cWe rely on everybody on campus to pull this off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every year, the Hope for the Holidays event coordinators reach out to their community members and partnerships in August to receive and coordinate donations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year Student Activities has partnered with Reading Heart<\/a> for book donations, ACD Distributions<\/a> for board game donations, EECU<\/a>, Save Mart and the FCC dental hygiene program<\/a> for toothbrushes. They also receive community member donations that are always appreciated, no matter how much money is donated, according to Torres.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve built some good partnerships,\u201d Torres said. \u201cAnyone can donate.\u201d<\/p>\n There are more nominees on campus than donations received, so not everyone nominated is guaranteed to receive a donation.<\/p>\n \u201cThey [gift card receivers] are always very polite, very considerate, and they do thank our volunteers or individuals at the table, processing and providing them with the card,\u201d Wong said.<\/p>\n Student Activities want to keep students in college and help them finish strong. Hosting the Hope for the Holidays program is one way to make sure students don\u2019t have to worry about finding a meal and can focus on their classes.<\/p>\n \u201cHopefully this is a little step in helping them to make sure that that [education] is successful,\u201d Wong said.<\/p>\n While the program may have been around for 36 years, it used to look quite different. 15 years ago it was called \u201cHoliday Baskets,\u201d and Student Activities would get baskets to donate canned food items, turkey and other staple items according to Wong.\u00a0<\/p>\n Students who took public transportation or rode bikes had difficulties getting around, so they now use gift cards to be more efficient.<\/p>\n \u201cIf students are picking up their holiday baskets and they need to go to class, and then they\u2019re lugging a frozen turkey,\u201d Wong said. \u201cYou can just as easily put it in your wallet and you can still be able to go ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n The Student Activities Center has around 40 student employees that help run the events including the Hope for the Holidays program. The student employees help represent the student perspective of how the activities center could improve, according to Torres.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do have some great faculty and staff that are volunteering their time to be part of the day that we pass out these items,\u201d Torres said.<\/p>\n The Hope for the Holidays program is an extension of the Student Activities Center. The relationship that the staff at the Center has with students is crucial and they focus on encouragement according to Torres.<\/p>\n \u201cHope means everything, especially with the life that the students go through,\u201d Torres said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s late night prep, early morning prep, some of the behind the scene type of work. I think what motivates us is just the love for our job and the love for students on campus.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hope for the Holidays is a Fresno City College program that works to serve students in need for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-78621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}