From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 9:56 PM
To: *All MetaTV
Subject: Hot News Alert: MetaTV mentioned in SF Chronicle article about Family Giving Tree
Happy 2002 everyone!
In case anyone missed it our very own Peter Ansel, who is responsible for bringing the Family Giving Tree participation to MetaTV was interviewed an quoted in this article in the San Francisco Chronicle 12/21.
Well done to Peter for his efforts and thanks to everyone for participating.
The link to the article is posted on our website at: http://www.metatv.com/news/inthenews.htm
Direct access at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/21/NB47600.DTL
COMMUNITY
Grad school project grows into Family Giving Tree
Heather Knight, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2001
________________________________________
She’s not your standard elf.
For starters, she’s 5-foot-7. She runs her workshop out of a strip mall in Milpitas. And the big, jolly guy she hangs out with? It’s her father and chief operating officer, Bob.
Still, Jennifer Cullenbine, 36, has all the elfin essentials. Her business card, decorated with a grinning teddy bear and neatly wrapped presents, reads “Queen Elf.” She often wears a green dress and hat lined with white fur. And she brings toys — and smiles — to kids around the Bay Area who sorely need both during the holiday season.
Her organization, The Family Giving Tree, is the largest of its kind in the Bay Area — helping kids in San Francisco, Marin, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
It works with social service agencies to find the wishes of needy children and then places trees strung with wish cards — reading, say, “Tommy, age 5, a toy truck” — in the lobbies of corporations. Workers take a card, buy the gift and place it underneath the tree. With the help of dedicated volunteers, the organization collects the gifts and gives them to the social service agencies, who in turn deliver the fun stuff to the excited children.
Sounds fairly simple — until you see the astonishing numbers. Last year, The Family Giving Tree teamed with 150 agencies and 3,000 volunteers to place 1,100 trees in the lobbies of 800 companies, winding up with 65,000 gifts for 45,000 kids. Take that, Santa! There must be a partridge in a pear tree in there somewhere, but you wouldn’t be able to find it under the gigantic mounds of gifts stored in the organization’s warehouse during the holiday rush.
The Family Giving Tree proves correct the old adage about giving and receiving. Peter Ansel, 32, of San Anselmo, said buying gifts for kids provides a much-needed dose of reality for the staff at MetaTV, an interactive television software company in Mill Valley.
“At a new startup, it definitely is easy to lose yourself, head down at your computer, with volumes of work,” he said. “So it’s nice when the holidays come around to have some sort of contact with the outside world.”
About 75 percent of the company participates. (It’s hard not to, considering the wish cards are hung from a string of lights decorating the front desk.)
“So nobody can miss them when they go pick up their paychecks,” Ansel said with a laugh.
Various companies donate warehouse space to The Family Giving Tree for the gifts each year; this season, the gifts are stored in a 100,000-square-foot space in Sunnyvale. Starting last Friday, workers from social service agencies have been driving trucks up to the warehouse doors on a tightly regimented schedule and whisking the presents away.
“It’s totally chaotic,” said Cullenbine, who lives in Milpitas with her husband, Dan Pietrasik, a programmer for IBM, and their two children, Kinsey, 10 weeks, and Connor, 22 months. “We’re all wearing radio headsets and screaming at each other.”
The frenzy proves worthwhile, though, after the kids get their stuffed animals, board games, clothes and dolls.
Pastor Ralph Gella, 33, of the San Francisco Rescue Mission, has worked with The Family Giving Tree to give presents to children in the Tenderloin for four years. The kids, wise to the workings of the organization, start approaching Gella as early as September with their wishes.
“The first year, it was 30 kids and every year it’s grown,” said Gella, who lives in the Richmond District. “This year alone, I’m looking at 800 kids. (The Family Giving Tree) have been a major help for us. Without them, it wouldn’t be a great Christmas season.”
The public can participate, as well, by visiting Wells Fargo Bank branches around the Bay Area. The company has supported The Family Giving Tree for years and will have 182 trees at various locations this year.
Thomas Roberts, 30, vice president and district manager for the bank’s downtown San Francisco branches, said the trees and gifts often get quizzical looks.
“It sparks a lot of conversation,” said the Corona Heights resident. “Our tellers and sales team members talk about it with our customers. It’s an exciting, fun, giving time.”
Though Cullenbine has expanded the operation every year since its founding, she expressed nervousness about this season’s success. With the shaky economy, more families have kids who need gifts and companies have fewer employees to donate them. Of the 150 service agencies involved, 140 reported needing more help from Cullenbine’s organization this year than last.
And the anthrax scare caused trepidation among companies who didn’t want hundreds of packages brought into their lobbies. For the first time, employees didn’t wrap the presents before placing them under the trees.
“I’m not worried at all about having 60,000 wrapped gifts in my warehouse, but if they’re concerned on their end, I’ll abide by that,” she said.
Though this year has been tricky, Cullenbine’s already looking far beyond it. Before she retires in 30 years, she wants to see the organization spread to companies and kids around the state.
“I don’t want to see a child in California go without,” she said. “I don’t want to see a company in California not provide gifts for children. If there’s a company out there having lavish Christmas parties and not supporting children, shame on them.”
It all started in 1990 when Cullenbine was pursuing her master’s in business administration at San Jose State University, where she’d received her bachelor’s degree in business management earlier that year. Not surprisingly, she didn’t envision becoming a Queen Elf. Instead, she thought coordinating weddings or corporate parties was in her future.
One classroom assignment changed all that.
Her professor, Stewart Wells, assigned teams of students to “create a program that adds value to someone else’s life.” Cullenbine wanted to solicit donations from corporations and give gifts to 300 kids in East Palo Alto, but her fellow students deemed it too difficult to pull off. They created team- building exercises for employees at IBM instead.
Cullenbine couldn’t shake her idea, though, and decided to pursue it on her own time. She got the names and phone numbers for needy families from a social service organization and called the children herself.
“I said, ‘My name is Jennifer and I’m an elf for Santa,’ ” she said. ” ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ It was the most fun couple of weeks in my life.”
There were language barriers, so she asked some Spanish-speaking friends to help. Some parents and grandparents who answered the phone thought it was a silly joke — Santa’s elf? Please.
Cullenbine would keep calling back until she made them believe.
“If we got the kids, they would say things like Tonka trucks and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and skateboards,” she said. “The grandparents would say, ‘They need jackets, they need a school uniform, they need a comforter for their bed because they’re cold at night.’ It became very clear there were needs and wants, so we focused on both. We’d make two cards per kid, like ‘Jose, 5, toy truck’ and ‘Jose, 5, pair of pants.’ ”
She telephoned 100 companies and asked them to participate. All turned her down. They were too busy. Her organization wasn’t established.
Click. Dial tone.
Finally, she reached someone who listened. Linda Haddock, then an administrative assistant for Hewlett-Packard, agreed to put a tree in the company’s cafeteria. Local newspapers picked up the story and soon, 28 companies wanted to participate. That year, 4,000 children received gifts.
Haddock, 44, of Hayward, now works at Hewlett-Packard’s spin-off, Agilent, but still participates in the gift-giving. She said she’s stunned at how far Cullenbine has come since that first season.
“Just the fact that this started off as a project she was doing for school, who would have thought it would have evolved like this?” she said. “Now, you talk about The Family Giving Tree and it’s almost like a household name. Everybody knows what it is.”
Companies like the program because it’s convenient and makes them feel connected to specific children, rather than giving generic gifts to anonymous kids.
“This gives you a personal attachment to some needy person and you can make a direct contribution to that person’s happiness,” said Melanie Fallis, 53, of Gilroy, who coordinates IBM’s work with the organization. “It’s very fulfilling. I know that my Barbie doll is going to Suzy and Suzy is 4.”
Cullenbine said she thought the idea was “a winner from the beginning,” but not even her biggest fans agreed. Her father, Bob Cullenbine, who retired from his job in real estate to help run his daughter’s operation, was initially hesitant.
“I told her she was really trying to expand it too quickly and she was going to fail,” said Bob, 63, of Palo Alto. “She ignored me totally and expanded it even more. The next year, we had the same conversation. She ignored me again and again expanded more than she planned to. After that, I just decided I’m not ever going to tell a young person who has lofty goals and dreams that they can’t do it, because some of them can. And she did.”
It wasn’t easy going at first. Cullenbine supported herself by working part time as a secretary in the off-season. (She now runs the organization full time and pays herself and her staff of two through donations and grants. The organization’s annual budget is $300,000.) For the first three years, she lived out of the organization’s warehouse, bathing in a baby pool she dragged into the bathroom and cooking food on a barbecue grill.
Looking back, Cullenbine said she thinks she developed her passion for community service after reaping the benefits of it herself as a child. The oldest of three children, she grew up in Palo Alto, but felt out of place in the affluent town. Her parents separated when she was 6 and the family had financial trouble. She was the first kid in Palo Alto to be registered in the school district’s free lunch program, which she said was very embarrassing.
But she vividly remembers the Christmas when the Palo Alto Jaycees, a community service club for young professionals, took her younger brother shopping for Christmas presents for the whole family. He picked out a purple watch for her with a face the size of an orange. She loved it.
As a second-grader, she visited the senior center next door to her elementary school three afternoons each week — and continued doing it for seven years. She also helped at a day-care center for children from low-income families, volunteered for the American Lung Association and did numerous walkathons for charity.
“The people that you meet, they’re people who care just like you do,” she said. “When I’ve left whatever I’ve been doing, I’ve had that warm feeling like I did good.”
But nothing has given her as much satisfaction as running The Family Giving Tree. It’s so hectic during the holiday season, she and her family don’t have time to celebrate themselves. But that’s just fine with her.
“I wake up on Christmas morning thinking, ‘We did it! We did it!’ ” she said. “There are 45,000 children out there opening presents and they’re happy. It’s totally worth it.”
E-mail Heather Knight at hknight@sfchronicle.com.