Columbia’s VAC Seeks Holiday Sponsors for 1,000 Families

Columbia’s Voluntary Action Center is looking for people willing to sponsor a family this Christmas, part of a Holiday Program that reaches more than 1,000 families across Boone County — including the Rocheport corner of it — every year.

VAC runs the program out of its Bowling Street campus, pairing local sponsors and volunteers with neighbors who need a lift to get through the holidays. The group says every dollar donated to the program “stays in Boone County and goes directly to families,” and the effort provides gifts, essential items and what the agency calls “holiday cheer” to households that sign up as clients.

How Do You Sponsor a Family?

Sponsor sign-ups are open now through Dec. 1, and volunteer sign-ups run a bit longer, through Dec. 12 — both through sign-up links posted at vacmo.org’s Holiday Program page. Gifts and essentials get dropped off and distributed to families Dec. 7 through 12 at Broadway Christian Church in Columbia.

Sponsoring typically means buying or donating gifts and essentials for an assigned family; volunteering covers everything from sorting donations to helping run distribution week itself. Either way, the quickest way in is a phone call to VAC at 573-874-2273 or an email to vac@vacmo.org, which can point you to the right sign-up link and answer questions the web page doesn’t.

What If You Need Help Yourself This Winter?

If you’re the one who could use a hand this season, a heads-up: sign-ups for families to receive help through this specific Holiday Program already closed Oct. 9 for this year. But that’s just one program — the Voluntary Action Center runs food, housing and emergency-assistance services year-round from the same Bowling Street location, and VAC staff can tell you what’s open now even if the holiday sign-up window has passed. The same number, 573-874-2273, is the place to start.

VAC’s Bowling Street campus is the same building the Times covered when it fully opened as the Opportunity Campus this summer, and which was already running near capacity a month later. The Holiday Program is a smaller, seasonal piece of that same operation — but for a family that signed up this fall, a sponsor showing up in December is exactly the kind of help that building was built around.