Dora Gilreath
Reporter
The Angel Tree project is a Crowder event that assists full-time students to provide gifts and food for families. The two assistant directors of Campus Life, Lori Kelley and Rodolpho Parra, are the heads of the project.
Kelley is in charge of accepting applications and notifying applicants if they apply while Parra is responsible for making sure the gifts and the food are given to the right families.
Parra described the process. “The very first thing is a student will fill out an application to make sure they are a full-time Crowder student (12 credit hours), Pell eligible, how many dependents they have, and if they qualify, we give them a form. Then we create the angels and provide the wanted gifts on them. Once we get enough applications, we put the tree up in the Farber building and put all the angels on there.”
The angel cutouts on the tree contain the name, age, gender, and gift wish for the Crowder students’ children and loved ones.
“Students and staff are encouraged to pick angels off the tree,” Parra said. “Once they do that, they have two and a half to three weeks to purchase the gifts, which are due around the week after Thanksgiving. They can wrap it up if they wish, but we usually want to make sure the gifts are what they wanted.”
Gifts provided include clothes, shoes, socks, toys, and video games.
Food and monetary donations are encouraged for the event. Along with gifts, students are provided with the supplies to make a Christmas dinner, which include canned food such as corn and green beans, turkey, potatoes, rolls, stuffing, and cookie and cake mix.
Kelley’s favorite part of the process is unity. “I like the fact that the campus comes together to help each other, because it’s faculty and staff and students that participate in the process. It’s the idea that we’re a family and we are helping our family,” Kelley stated.
Anyone can help purchase gifts for students or provide a donation.
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