Christmas in July campaign asks donors to give early for children in foster care

By GvilleTX Newsroom

Child welfare organization TFI is asking donors to begin their Christmas giving in the middle of summer. The group's Christmas in July appeal seeks donations months ahead of the holidays for children and teens in foster care, and the campaign page on TFI's website asks givers to help make sure those children experience "joy, excitement, and belonging" on Christmas morning. The organization's tie to the Texoma area runs through its 2INgage division, which the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services identifies as the foster care contractor for a 30-county region the state calls Big Country and Texoma.

The early ask is deliberate, according to the campaign page. Donations that arrive now give TFI time to plan ahead before the holiday season begins, the page says.

A separate holiday-giving page on TFI's site describes what donations support. The money goes toward Christmas gifts and warm clothing for local foster children, that page says, along with toys, books, stocking stuffers, personal-care items and gift cards.

The Texoma connection appears in state contracting records. DFPS names 2INgage as a division of Texas Family Initiative and the Single Source Continuum Contractor for Region 2, Big Country and Texoma, under Community-Based Care, the state's system of hiring regional providers to run foster care services. The agency lists the region as a 30-county North Texas area operating at Stage III of that model. On its own background page, 2INgage says its territory includes Wichita Falls and Abilene and that it operates under a Community-Based Care contract with the State of Texas.

Cooke County sits outside that map. DFPS's foster care and adoption information listings place Gainesville and the rest of the county in Region 3W, where Our Community Our Kids handles information meetings, while neighboring Grayson County appears in Region 3E under a contractor called EMPOWER. According to those listings, foster care in Cooke County falls to different organizations than the TFI division that holds the Big Country and Texoma contract.

Holiday drives have precedent for that division. In 2020, 2INgage hosted a Giving Tree that provided Christmas gifts to almost 500 Texas children in foster care, according to a post on the organization's website.

The pages reviewed for this report did not list a fundraising goal, a deadline or a Cooke County drop-off location for the current appeal, which is posted on TFI's donation site at tfifamily.org.