Operation Christmas Child Q & A
I recently received an email from a lady named Rebekah who had a lot of GREAT OCC questions. I decided to pose them to Diane Rice, the Northwest area coordinator, to help me provide correct information.
What is the difference between a Relay Center, Processing Center and a Collection Center?
Relay Centers are what they call all of the churches and businesses who collect shoebox donations. Once Collection Week begins, someone from each Relay Center brings all of the shoeboxes they have collected in to the Collection Center for packing into cartons.
Collection Centers spring up for shoebox Collection Week only. They are often churches or businesses with space to spare, that they lend to Operation Christmas Child and it’s volunteers to enable them to collect and carton up all the shoeboxes. Once Collection Week is done, the Collection Center is too.
Processing Centers are massive, permanent warehouses. After the cartons of shoeboxes leave the Collection Centers, they are trucked to Processing Centers around the country. Shoeboxes move through the warehouse on conveyor belts.
What happens at a Processing Center?
Inspection of full shoeboxes: Every box is inspected at the Processing Center for inappropriate items like chocolate, war toys, liquids, shampoo, food items, breakables etc.
If a box arrives at the Processing Center broken and needs to be repacked, do they keep the items together or do they divide them into other shoeboxes?
The integrity of the box is a value Samaritan’s Purse highly endorses. That means that the box is kept fully intact as much as possible as those items have been specially chosen for the recipient as well as prayed over by the individual family. Gift box contents will never be divided. In fact the only time they will be retouched is if by chance they have been damaged in the journey. If so, the box ends up in the “Box Hospital” and is repacked as closely as possible to it’s original state.
Most shoeboxes are at least 50% bigger than the Go Boxes, and shoes for a man or teenage boy may be twice the size of the Go Boxes, if the box is too big, do they repack it in smaller boxes and divide up the stuff?
Again, no. Many of the shoeboxes they receive are MUCH larger than the little red and green Go Boxes. It is like playing Tetris in 3-D, fitting the shoeboxes into the cartons at the Collection Centers, and they go through a similar process repacking them after inspection at the Processing Centers.
They will not divide your shoebox contents up into other boxes. Sometimes though, the opposite problem occurs, and a box may come in that just really doesn’t have very many things in it. If it is a “light” box, or has a lot of empty space available, they will add filler items called Gifts in Kind.
Gifts in Kind
Filler items are available to top off shoeboxes at the Processing Center, and sometimes at the Collection Centers as well. Corporate donors provide large quantities of items. Individual donations are accepted at Relay Centers and Collection Centers, such as leftover items from Packing Parties.
From there they are sent in cartons to the Processing Centers as Gift In Kind. They are sorted and distributed out to the assembly lines to be used as filler items. The inappropriate items that are removed are channeled to local charities. Nothing is wasted!
I would love to volunteer at the Processing Center near me. How can I do that?
Every year Volunteer Applications are accepted in early Fall for working at the PC’s. Watch the Samaritan’s Purse website for specific deadlines and directions. Shift times vary and are part of the application process.
Read more about Operation Christmas Child here:
10 Things You Should Know about Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes
The Most Important Task in the Journey of a Shoebox
Sign Up to Serve: Operation Christmas Child’s Collection Week
Collection Week starts this Monday the 13th! Do you have your shoebox ready?
Dawn is retired 20-year homeschooling Momma and hospital CNA, currently working on her BA in Technical Communication. She lives in Eastern Washington with her husband, the youngest 2 of their 6 kids, 2 yappy pomeranians and an assortment of backyard chickens. She writes here as well as at DawnMariePerkins.com (her personal/geek blog).
Thanks for finding out the answer to all those questions! I’m sharing your blog post with my Facebook friends.
Glad I could help Rebekah! 🙂
Having volunteered for 10 days in 2 years at a processing center, practically every cartonizer, the gal or guy, plying 3D Tetris with the shoe boxes in the cartons. Starts to dislike (maybe hate) plastic boxes, especially large plastic boxes, anything bigger than a standard plastic shoe box. Boot boxes are next on the list. We were frequently waiting for Go boxes so we could get at leastb15 into a carton. Some folks had gone oversea to help distribute the boxes and told of locations where they were short boxes because the cartons held less than 15, and some children did not get a box. That was really sad. Once we had over 20 bigger boxes waiting, stacked where there wasn’t room for stacking, for Go boxes so we could get 15 in a carton.
Also when inapporiate items get taken out, that is when the filler items become important.
I agree Hank, although you can actually get 23 GoBoxes into a carton, not 15. We get 23 into every carton when we pack just GoBoxes. We have volunteered at the Collection Center every year for the past 9 years. That shoebox Tetris can be challenging, I agree. Boot boxes and the large plastic ones are the WORST! It sickens me to pack up SIX bix plastic boxes in a carton that should have between 12-20 in it. And we don’t usually take part in a church packing thing, because we have worked directly with OCC for so many years. We just bring our shoeboxes in when we serve at the Collection Center. Thanks for your input!
Oh one more thing. Girls 5 to 9 get the most shoe boxes. Why? Well I find it easier and. maybevmore fun than the others. Boys 2 to 4 and 10 to 14 get the least. It almost seems like there were more boxes for girls 5 to 9 than boys. 2 to 4 and 10 to 14 combined.
If your church is going to have a major shoebix campaign or a big packing party, keep that in mind. If you do that, you may have to get a different mix of age and gender appropriate things.
This year we were going to do only boys 2to4 and 10 to 14. But there things that our granddaughter outgrew before she even wore them. So we had a few boxes for girls also.
Can you open packages of multi items and put them in different boxes, fir example a 6 pack of socks, a 4 pack of face xlitgs, a 3 pack of tooth brushes, a package of 30 hair ties…
Also, can you open bulky packages from gifts so that you can put more inside the boxes? For example i bought a huge package of screw divers, can i take them out if the package and put a rubber band around them and stick the pointed ends in a small wash cloth?
Of course, Ruth! We do that frequently, putting in a couple pairs of socks, underwear, etc. I’d not thought about sending screwdrivers but I’m sure that would be okay? Might be best to have those in original packaging though, since they tend to come in wrappers that are tougher (but also heavier.)
Thanks. Glad you could read through all those typos!
No problem Ruth! 🙂
We’re preparing for Operation Christmas Child season, and I found your post very informative. Thank you!
You’re very welcome, Diane!