Storage is at a premium at Inter-Faith Community Services as sponsors bring in the gifts and the organization distributes them with a goal of reaching out to make it a nicer Christmas for 550 families and 100 seniors.

However, like so many charitable organizations, Inter-Faith has seen the requests for assistance and help steadily increase while, at the same time, donations and the number of sponsors for projects like the Adopt-a-Family Christmas program, have declined.

“Right now, we don’t have enough sponsors so we don’t know if we’ll be able to reach out and help 550 families and 100 seniors,” said Maria Peason, Inter-Faith community relations director. “The good news is we have had a number of sponsors step forward in the last week, which moves us closer to our goal. But we still hope we will have more sponsors step forward because we still have more than 100 on the waiting list.”

It is easy to become an Adopt-a-Family sponsor.

When someone signs up as a sponsor, he or she is provided with a profile of the family they will sponsor. The profile lists each family member’s name, age, clothing sizes, favorite colors and requested gifts. The sponsor also usually provides a supermarket gift certificate to enable the family to buy the ingredients to cook a holiday meal.

Pearson said sponsors can select the family they want to help and spend an average of $50 per family member. The families on the list range from a single parent with one child to a family that is the parents and seven or eight children.

“There is an average of four or five members of the families on our list,” Pearson, Inter-Faith said. “A great many of the gifts will go to single-parent families. It used to be that single-parent families were mom and the children. We have seen a big increase in families with dad as the single parent.”

The sponsors bring the gifts to the Inter-Faith office at 3370 S. Irving St. for distribution to the families. The distribution began Dec. 1 and will be completed by Dec. 12.

Pearson said people are busy and may not have time to do all the shopping in order to get the items to Inter-Faith by the deadline. If that is the case, the sponsor can provide the funds and Inter-Faith has six or seven volunteers who are skilled shoppers and they hit the stores looking for the best gifts for the money.

For information about the holiday gift program or to be a sponsor, call Pearson at 303-789-0501.