We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tina Carreira. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tina below.
Hi Tina, thanks for joining us today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
We will be starting our Christmas Wish Tree event in september We will be asking the community to help grant wishes to almost 70 families this year.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
TBA originally began in 1995 by donating to Loma Linda Children’s Hospital Unit 4800, Oncology when my nephew Mikey passed away from neuroblastoma cancer at 8 yrs old. Prior to his passing, my family was the 1st to implement the treasure box toy chests at Unit 4800 so the kids had a toy/treat to take home after their treatments (like the dental office treasure chest concept). TBA has donated toys for these toy chests every yr for almost 30 yrs now; even if its a few hundred dollars worth of toys. We are proud to say, that our treasure box concept has been implemented amongst all the playrooms at LLCH & we’ve been donating to these floors for a few years now. When given the opportunity, we sometimes donate other items such as character beanies, slippers, Dvd movies & games.
Five yrs ago, we started a Christmas Wish Tree Event where we grant Christmas wishes to our sponsored families. We also make sure each family is gifted with either a grocery store gift card or gas gift card or even both. We started out with 8 families our 1st yr & we had over 50 families this past Christmas!
We are also pleased to say, that even during a pandemic, we were able to host special birthday get togethers almost every month in 2021 & gift ea of our sponsored children a 16×20 canvas print of them as their favorite superhero, princess, gaming character, or whatever they wanted to be, we made it happen!
We have always been a non profit, and became a 501c3 non profit in 2020 so we can aim for corporate donations & grants but covid has put a damper on these donations these past 2 yrs. We all work full-time & give our time to tba in our spare time. We dont collect salaries, we dont host big galas or golf tournaments; we are just a small non-profit with big hearts & want to give to these families as much as we cud give.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
With the help from others that support our mission, we have been spreading the word about our organization through social media reels, stories & posts on Instagram & Facebook.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
We have been able to grant wishes to each of our sponsored families & their siblings for 5 yrs now.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.treasureboxangels.org
- Instagram: treasureboxangels
- Facebook: treasureboxangels
- Yelp: treasure box angels
Image Credits
self