By Tala Habbal

[email protected]

UK’s Center for Community Outreach is spreading the love by gathering Christmas presents for children whose families need some extra support over the holiday season.

“I always compare it to the Angel Tree,” said psychology senior and event coordinator Raven Robbins. “We always provide gifts to people that … if it wasn’t for this program, most likely wouldn’t receive any Christmas gifts this season.”

Room 251 in the Student Center was buzzing Monday with people sorting through gifts during the Circle of Love event, making sure all of the gift bags were ready to drop off to the kids on Thursday.

“These are young kids, they still believe in Santa and I feel like I don’t want to ruin their childhood and be like, ‘Oh, Santa couldn’t come,’ because their parents weren’t able to afford gifts,” Robbins said.

Organizers collected gifts from 8 a.m. through 5 p.m. Monday.

Tuesday is the deadline to drop off presents at the CCO.

Circle of Love sponsors scrolled through the children’s wish lists, which are available at the CCO, and selected the child they wished to sponsor that best suited their financial capabilities.

Sponsors are asked to purchase between two and four gifts per child with each gift averaging about $25.

“We know a lot of our sponsors are students and that they want to buy gifts, but can’t necessarily buy a PlayStation 4,” said Jillian Pyatte, the assistant director of the CCO.

Each child will receive at least one toy and one item of clothing.

Children who are not assigned a sponsor will still receive gifts provided by the organizers and funded with leftover savings from fundraisers carried out throughout the year, Robbins said.

The gifts will mostly be donated to Fayette County elementary school children who are considered borderline-impoverished, Robbins said.

For privacy reasons, the identities of the recipients are not revealed, and the entire process is kept confidential.

Family resource counselors at each elementary school pick the children who will be receiving these donations based on certain criteria.

512 children were sponsored this year, Pyatte added, three more than the previous year.

Circle of Love is a 20-year-old program that was founded by UK staff years ago, and later turned into a student-run initiative.

Last year, organizers started asking if sponsors could also include some kind of grocery store gift card along with the presents.

“A lot of the families that we serve, the children are on free and reduced lunch in school,” said Pyatte. “So when they are home for the holiday break, it could be a hard impact on the families trying to feed the kids. So when sponsors are able to, we ask them to include that as well.”

There are a total of seven volunteers helping out this year, all of whom are students.

“I just think the holidays are a great time to give back to people,” said UK student and sponsor Liz Myers. “I hope that [the children] are grateful and thankful that someone was thinking about them this year.”