That’s a Wrap on our 2025 Christmas Gift Drive!
A huge thank you to everyone who supported our gift drive for Westminster families this Christmas.
Your incredible generosity enabled us to collect 650 presents. The gifts were wrapped by a team of 146 volunteer elves from 12 Grand Union BID members on Thursday 11 December and are now on their way to local children in time for Christmas.
This gift drive was organised in partnership with Westminster City Council’s Health Navigators – a small team who play a vital role in connecting families across the borough with the health, education and social services they need. These navigators are based in family hubs and work closely with GP practices, schools and community organisations to support families facing complex challenges. The teams work with families who are identified by GP’s records as living in the 20% most deprived postcodes in Westminster.
It turns out that collecting, wrapping and delivering hundreds of culturally sensitive and age-appropriate gifts takes more logistics than we could have ever imagined and we have a long thank you list to share:
- CC Land One Kingdom Street – generously provided the venue (aka Santa’s workshop) for all the wrapping to take place and a gift donation point
- Novotel Paddington – supplied hot drinks throughout to keep the volunteer elves hydrated and happy
- Brunel Building, The Point and Paddington Central’s 4 Kingdom Street – all hosted essential gift donation points in their foyers at the start of December to collate presents
- Heathrow Express, FM Conway and European Land – who each made financial donations on behalf of their companies to purchase presents for the drive
- Marks & Spencer – donated 80 metres of beautiful wrapping paper and gift tags to adorn presents
- Vodafone – loaned chairs, tape dispensers and scissors, in addition to providing rolls of paper, enabling super speedy wrapping
In addition to the BID members and their incredible employees who generously purchased and brought along gifts with them to wrap - we are so grateful for your kindness.
These presents that have been donated and lovingly wrapped will make a huge difference to our families, not only at a time where things seem universally hard but particularly in December, when extra costs and pressures arise. We have been inundated with calls from parents who are not only having to choose between eating and bills, but also want to be able to provide presents. We work directly with these families and know that these presents will bring such joy to the children and also some peace to the parents. We honestly cannot thank you enough from the bottom of our hearts.
We’ve been humbled by everyone's kindness and enthusiasm for supporting this campaign and would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to the 2,057 (and still counting) individuals who have worked with the Community Team in 2025. We can’t wait to see what we achieve together in 2026…we’ve a feeling it’s going to be busy!