Treasure Boxes
Treasure Boxes is a volunteer-run children's charity. The service provides quality donated and pre-loved material goods such as clothes, toys and equipment such as prams and carseats for disadvantaged children and families.
The organisation works in conjuction with South Australian support organisations, meeting requests from Maternal and Child Health nurses and local emergency support agencies.
SAcommunity had the opportunity to learn from Treasure Boxes founder Rikki Cook about her organisation and find out more about the not-for-profit organisation and it's beginnings.
Our beginnings
Founder Rikki Cooke established the organisation in 2015, after personal experiences working with children from Families SA who were removed and displaced from their families. Too often these children would arrive with little - if any - clothes, toys, or personal belongings to provide comfort and distraction.
Emergency care organisations struggle to provide these bare necessities with limited resources and funding. Since our start, we have grown to be able to increase our support to not only children and families fleeing from domestic violence, but also to families living in emergency housing accommodation or other significant disadvantage.
What we do
We meet or exceed each request for our services from support agencies with quality pre-loved donations. At the bare minimum our ‘Treasure Boxes’ consist of between 50 – 70 items of clothing across all seasons and age-appropriate toys and books for each child. Since commencing in 2015, we have distributed over 650 clothing packs, ‘Treasure Boxes’ or baby care packages including bassinette’s, cots, pushers and car seats, and over 200 Christmas presents.
Why We Do It
We strongly feel that that every baby and child in South Australia deserves to have access to clean and suitable clothing, toys and books, and have a safe place to sleep, or travel safely in a car or pusher. We believe that by coordinating the resources and goodwill provided by our donators, we can provide a vital service for kids and families in South Australia.
We are unique in the fact that we can provide a service for support agencies, where all the hard work is done for them. Treasure Boxes achieves this through collecting, sorting and cleaning donations, ensuring the goods meet Australian safety standards, and packing items specifically for the child referred.
What we want to achieve
In 2018 we secured our first warehouse and our fundraising dollars are currently being utilised to expand and strengthen our services so we can reach and impact as many South Australian children affected by disadvantage as possible. Treasureboxes is looking for like-minded supporting partnerships to ensure our mission to join support agencies throughout SA to meet the material needs of children living in disadvantage.
Contact Treasure Boxes for more information or if you can provide support or donations.
