Tampa Bay area non-profit helps lift foster families spirits for Christmas

TAMPA, Fla. - When Sarah Weaver decided to start a movement to buy Christmas presents for foster children, she had no idea how big the need was. She gathered a group of foster moms to help with the idea of helping foster children have a Merry Christmas.

The Radiant Church in Tampa is looking more like Santa's workshop these days. It's full of Christmas gifts for those who really need a lift this time of year. 

"We do this all for the foster child and to give them the best Christmas ever and to give them joy on Christmas morning," Weaver, the founder of Christmas for Fosters, said. 

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To help make sure that foster children would have gifts for Christmas, Weaver started the non-profit program in 2017. 

"This was literally just a project that we were doing with my church for 45 kids," she said. "And so every year it's snowballed bigger and bigger and bigger from 45 kids."  

Just last year, the group served 678 children.

Weaver and her husband are foster parents and realized the financial difficulty that foster parents were having while shopping for Christmas gifts. She said some of them have two or three foster kids on top of their own children. 

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Liz Aguero and her husband fostered children for 10 years. 

"It blessed our family and helped our family tremendously through the holiday season," Aguero said. "Traditionally, you don't get extra money for Christmas, birthdays, things like that. So Christmas for Fosters really helped our family." 

Although, foster parents receive a small stipend from the state, that wasn't enough money to buy Christmas gifts for the children. Kids create a wish list of items and participants go on to the website and select a child that they go shopping for. 

"With the prices on everything right now, it's just so expensive and so hard on our families who are already giving so much of their time, their energy, their resources to serve these kids," Weaver said. "So if we as a community are able to come around them and wrap around them and love on them in this way, there is literally no better support for them during this time of the year."

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In the first year, they served 87 kids and this year they will help more than 600 foster children.

Weaver said if you don't have time to shop just go on the website and make a donation, and they will do it for you. For more information, visit www.christmasforfosters.com.