About us
Toy Hub's mission is to ensure every local child has a gift to open at Christmas, by providing parents and caregivers with unwrapped, age appropriate gifts.
​​Why do we exist?
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Put very simply, we believe that every child should be able to open a gift from their grown-ups on Christmas Day!
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Christmas and the build-up to it is such an exciting time for many. However for many others, when the days start getting shorter and those twinkling lights start appearing, so does a huge amount of stress. Toy Hub aims to relieve some of that stress in the form of un-wrapped gifts, delivered to parent and carers in the lead up-to Christmas.
How do we do it?
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A bit like a pop-up shop to be honest! We appear for approximately six weeks of the year, and with the support of our local community, we mange to sort, pack and deliver new and like-new, un-wrapped gifts for hundreds of children in the lead up to Christmas. Why so early we hear you ask? Quite simply, to avoid any un-due worry for the grown-ups that we are supporting.
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This is what it looks like:​
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We open donations point for new and like new toys and gifts for 0-18 year olds.
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We start collecting these donations and taking them back to Toy Hub HQ (otherwise known as a warehouse space that we are kindly gifted for eight(ish) weeks).
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The donations are sorted/checked/cleaned/repaired/washed/spruced up to ensure they look 'like new'.
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We finish taking donations after a couple of weeks and continue 'sorting & putting away' until everything has found its place on a shelf.
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The warehouse now looks like an albeit (less organised) version of a shop.
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We start packing* everything into bags ready for delivering.
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Packing and delivering on repeat until the end.
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*How do we know what to pack? We have a system which involves lots of individually labelled tags and separate packing lists to make sure we don't miss anything.
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We deliver everything un-wrapped. Why? We don’t provide support to children, we provide support to the grown-ups so that they can gift to their children. ​
​Where do we do this?
We work across HP4 and HP23 postcodes.
Berkhamsted, Tring and surrounding villages.
What do we rely on?
The obvious one, money. We are so immensely grateful for the financial support we’ve received so far. We are always happy to have conversations about how you can support us with this.
The support of our local community! Whether that be a physical donation or a financial one, letting us put up a big banner, being a donation point, lending us a huge warehouse space. The list is endless to be honest.
Donations. We depend on physical donations from our local community of new and like new gifts for children aged 0-18. Without these, we wouldn’t be able to provide any support.
The super heroes aka our volunteers. All this would be impossible without the support of our wonderful volunteers! Collecting, sorting and packing thousands of donations in the space of a few weeks is no mean feat. We are truly grateful for the support we receive each year. Our volunteers are precious individuals and key to Toy Hub succeeding each year.
What does the future look like for Toy Hub?
Right now, we are still quite new and will continue focussing our time on achieving a well run project in the lead-up to Christmas.​
Some other stuff that’s important to us:
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One of our aims is to be able to provide every child with one brand new gift.
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Each year we aim to provide a roll of wrapping paper, sellotape, a toothbrush and toothpaste and some kind of chocolatey treat with every bag that is delivered.
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Delivering gifts un-wrapped is a really important part of what we do.
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We love local. Local support, spending local wherever we can and the achievements of what a local community can do when they team up. Local people, supporting local.
We like to do our bit to reduce landfill. Which is why we accept donations of new AND like new gifts for 0-18 years olds. We fix, clean, re-package, wash and sort every donation and only throw away things that have no life left in them. If we can’t re-use a donation, we find someone that can. Anything we have left at the end is re-homed to other local organisations that can benefit from them. Even the plastic bags that donations are delivered in, we put aside and re-use it to pack gifts back in to.