Christmas charities team up

MAT-SU — Christmas Super Friends? Yuletide Voltron? Wasilla’s answer to Santa’s Elves? His reindeer?

No matter your metaphor, a trio of Valley charities — Wasilla Christmas Friendship Dinner, Mat-Su Special Santa and Santa Cop and Heroes — has united their super powers this year to maximize their ability to spread Christmas cheer.

“The partnership is working out very nicely,” said Elsie O’Bryan, who heads the Wasilla Christmas Friendship Dinner. “They have resources that we don’t have.”

Some of the ways they are working together are as simple as networking, such as Special Santa is handing out information about the friendship dinner while distributing toys to needy children.

“We’re all trying to share the information,” O’Bryan said. “If a family is in need of assistance with gifts for the kids, well, then there’s a strong likelihood that they might want to have a meal with us.”

Over at Santa Cop, Donna Anthony, whose work in past years has mostly involved senior citizens, said that the Christmas Friendship Dinner had emailed her Tuesday telling her about a senior citizen — a person, mind you, who is more than 80 years old — whose Certified Nurse’s Aid had run off with all her money — everything.

Anthony said her group is helping that woman get back on her feet, and meanwhile has hooked her up with the friendship dinner.

That’s how it’s working this year, she said. The folks Santa Cop serves can connect with bus to the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center in Wasilla, or, if they prefer, have meals delivered to their homes.

Delivering meals is something the friendship dinner has done for years, it’s just expanded with the addition of Santa Cop.

“The Christmas Friendship Dinner will deliver all of the meals that are on the Santa Cop list, plus all of the ones that are on their list,” she said.

As Santa Cop matures it has morphed, Anthony said. Christmas is still the big day of bringing gifts to the seniors, but it’s become a whole lot more.

“It’s year-round now,” she said.

A referral a couple of weeks ago had her organization filling out paperwork for a disabled man who couldn’t fill out his Social Security paperwork on his own and was about to lose his home because he couldn’t pay the rent.

“He would have been homeless on the street and disabled, which was unacceptable,” Anthony said.

So Santa Cop filled out the paperwork and paid some of the rent to keep him in his house.

Another woman needed firewood.

“We helped bring in wood to keep her warm. She only had like two logs left,” Anthony said. “She was over at the neighbors trying to keep warm.”

Referrals to Santa Cop now go through the various Valley senior centers, which will make sure there isn’t another way to help the person through a different charity or government agency.

Anthony, until very recently, was an officer with the Palmer Police Department, hence the “cop” in Santa Cop. She said a lot of referrals still come, as they likely always will, from police and other emergency responders.

“The police departments and the first responders, when they’re going into these houses they’re seeing these things,” she said. “We don’t have the resources here in the Valley like Anchorage does. We have to do this out here. We don’t have homeless shelters. We don’t have the facilities that Anchorage has, or the resources.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.