You can help others by donating to 'Lot of Love' program

Menifee residents are invited to support this special cause created by Menifee 24/7 correspondent Tommie Brown and her mother:

Two years ago, my family and I had an idea that if we pulled all the resources we had, we could create a make-shift Christmas tree lot in our yard and invite a few families who needed a little help to pick out their own Christmas tree for free. What happened then grew into something far greater than we had originally intended.

Now seeing our third year of Lot of Love, we have been able to give families, truly, a Merry Little Christmas. From stockings to presents, to food and cleaning supplies, our home has facilitated wonderful acts of giving brought together by a community.

The idea behind the event was to gather together with our community and create an environment of hope being met. While Christmas is meant to be a time of great hope, it often turns into a season of upset, of lack, and of hope being lost. For every one thing we have the time and funds to make happen, there are 10 more things that we cannot. It creates this perpetual cycle of not fulfilling all the things we had hoped we could accomplish. But when you take a step back from that cycle and look at what it becomes, it looks a lot like gathering and storing up, and a lot less like actual giving. Rather than add to the lists of things we need to make happen for ourselves, leaving us hopeless, maybe there was a way to get hope back, by giving it.

2020 has been a year none of us could have or even dared to imagine, but the worst part of it all has been that on most days, there seems to be no hope in any room we enter. My mom once told me, though, that hope doesn’t only exist when we have reason to believe. But rather hope is in the act of moving forward, or simply moving at all. Because to be in motion is to believe there is something to move towards.

So this year more than ever, my family and I ask you all to move, in even the smallest of ways you can, like donating to this event. Because maybe, just maybe, if we help someone who is at the end of their rope, it will give us the strength to climb back up our own.

A big thank you to Wickerd Farm for donating the trees to this event and these families, for the third year in a row.

To donate, visit the gofundme at https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-lot-of-love

To contact, please email me at br.tommie@gmail.com.