The question that started it all
was asked in 2012.
It was asked by an eight-year-old. The answer has taken thirteen years and counting.
December · 2012 · San Jose
What happens to the kids who don’t get any toys?
That eight-year-old was Joey Childs. He couldn’t stop thinking about kids in his community who might wake up on Christmas morning with nothing to open — not because their families didn’t love them, but because life had been hard that year.
So Joey and his family did the most obvious thing: they collected toys. New ones, unwrapped. A few from neighbors, a few from school. Enough to fill the back of a truck. That December they delivered them to families in need.
The next year they did it again. And the year after that.
A truckload became thirteen Decembers of work.
What started in a family driveway in 2012 has become a regional operation. Joey’s Toy Drive now works with more than 120 partner companies — Fortune 500s among them — that host collection drives at their workplaces every November and December.
Toys are collected, picked up, sorted at the San Jose warehouse, and delivered to families across nine counties: Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Monterey, and Santa Cruz.
The 2024 drive collected 30,000 toys. The 2025 drive collected close to 40,000. Year after year, the answer to that 2012 dinner-table question is the same: no child in our community should wake up to nothing on Christmas morning.
The promise behind every one of those toys has not changed since 2012.
Run entirely by volunteers.
Still.
Joey’s Toy Drive has no paid staff. The team that organizes the annual drive, runs the warehouse, manages partner relationships, and coordinates delivery does this work outside of regular jobs and schoolwork. Several core members put in thirty hours a week during the season — on top of their day jobs.
№ 01
Joey Childs
Founder & Director
№ 02
Brooke Childs
Community Relations
№ 03
Andrey Dini
Logistics
№ 04
Adam Berg
Transportation
№ 05
Dennis O'Donnell
Operations
№ 06
Katherine Vargas
Communications
The trucks,
the warehouse,
the freight.
Moving 40,000 toys through one warehouse in six weeks — collected from 120+ workplaces and delivered to nonprofits, schools, and parishes across nine counties — is a logistics operation. It runs on the time and equipment of Silicon Valley Moving & Storage, whose trucks, warehouse space, and freight handling are donated to Joey’s Toy Drive every year.
It is the reason a volunteer team can deliver at this scale without paid staff.