Link to Hope works with schools and provides teaching resources wherever possible. Although the Christmas Shoebox Appeal is seasonal, we also fund educational projects all year round. Your school is welcome to get involved.

This Christmas shoebox lesson highlights the differences between our homes in the UK and the households to which shoeboxes are delivered by our project workers. Again, there are photographs for teachers to show pupils.

We can supply you with as many posters and leaflets as you need to help children and parents/carers understand more about the cause you are supporting.

We fully appreciate that many parents and carers are unable to spend £20 on filling a Christmas shoebox with essential and a few luxury items. Instead, we recommend that pupils bring in one gift from our list of items to put in the shoeboxes (this will need to be coordinated to avoid ending up with too many of one type of item).

From here the children can add their item to a shoebox, and perhaps older children could write about how they imagine their gift would help the family or elderly person who receives it. Please see the various lessons and photographs in the PowerPoint downloads above to give the children sufficient background information.

Of course, if any parents are willing to fill a box themselves, we welcome this too. We also have homemade gift ideas that some members of your pupils’ families might want to donate if they enjoy crafts.

1. Your Christmas shoeboxes will go to the poorest people in Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria and Romania. We are always happy to provide photographs and stories from recipients.
2. Delivering Christmas shoeboxes to homes helps our project workers identify any emergencies, and address them. For example:
   1. Maria, aged 74, was found sleeping on the dirt floor of her freezing home. Seeing this, Link to Hope also delivered a bed, blankets and pillows to Maria.
   2. A Christmas shoebox was delivered to a family who were grieving for their baby, who had died from cold because they had no money to heat the one room they all lived in. Link to Hope supporters raised enough funds to rehouse the family in a purpose-built container home.
3. We believe that Christmas shoeboxes send a powerful caring message from British people to those in war-torn or poverty-stricken circumstances, regardless of their background, colour, creed or religion.
4. Unlike other Christmas shoebox appeals, our scheme collects boxes for entire families and the elderly, so nobody’s left out.
5. We are small, yet established enough to have personal relationships with the individuals in Eastern Europe who work hard delivering your boxes. For transparency, we also conduct spot-checks to confirm that the right people are receiving your boxes.
6. Although Link to Hope is a Christian charity, all our projects are non-religious, including the shoebox appeal. Our neutrality enables us to help communities, regardless of religion, and we do not hand out evangelical material with our Christmas shoeboxes and humanitarian aid.

As you can imagine, coordinating our Christmas Shoebox Appeal is an enormous undertaking each year, so we started in May. We’re keen to hear from schools as soon as possible. We start shipping Christmas shoeboxes in November.

If you can help us, please register or contact us directly and we will be in touch with you.