One East Meadow family’s way of giving back turned into a community effort for Birthday Wishes

What started out as one family’s way of giving back has turned into a community effort. About 10 years ago, East Meadow native Amanda Skoros decided to get her family involved with Birthday Wishes, a nonprofit organization that helps homeless children and their families celebrate birthdays. Now, years later, community members drop supplies at her house year-round.

Birthday Wishes offers two types of party programs, either throwing a party for a child at their shelter, or creating a Birthday-in-a-Box with supplies and gifts — everything a parent would need to throw their child a party.

The organization was founded in 2002 in Massachusetts. Now it serves children living in more than 200 family shelters and transitional living facilities across Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Long Island. According to its website, over 26,000 homeless children, up to 17 years old, have Birthday Wishes parties each year.

When the Skoros family got involved a decade ago, they bought items for the Birthday-in-a-Box program, but they eventually began baking cakes for children in homeless shelters, too, before the organization transitioned to sending mug cakes — a small packet filled with cake batter that can be made into a cake with just milk or water in a microwave — to children.

“Unfortunately, children who are in homeless shelters, some of them have never even had a birthday cake, which is something that people take for granted,” Skoros said. “My husband and I raised our children to give back no matter what, even if it’s something little.”

Skoros said that she reaches out to Birthday Wishes throughout the year to see if the organization needs anything, and sometimes it reaches out to her.

The first time she appealed to the community to help with her efforts, she was collecting wrapping paper. She posted on Facebook, and soon she got responses.

“I just thought, let me put it out there — let me see what happens,’” Skoros recalled. “It was beyond what I could have even expected. The community came together, and it was fun.”

Since then, whenever she has initiated a collection, she has posted on any of East Meadow’s numerous community Facebook pages. Friends, neighbors and strangers have helped her collect juice boxes, toys, birthday party supplies, wrapping paper and mug cakes.

Her most recent collection for the organization was for toys for younger kids. Once again, the community came through.

“The collection I have is unbelievable,” she said. “East Meadow is unbelievable with the amount of people that donate and reach out. I’ll come home and there will be boxes on my steps or bags of stuff on my steps, and it’s just amazing.”

Skoros said that her whole family — her husband, Len, and their kids, Ryan, 20, Brianne, 18, and Kellen, 12 — helps get the word out whenever they’re collecting stuff.

“It’s very humbling,” Amanda said. “It’s a good thing for the kids to see and for the community to be involved in.”

As a parent, she said, it’s difficult to imagine that some kids don’t have birthday celebrations, and that’s why she likes Birthday Wishes.

“My children have been lucky enough to be able to celebrate their birthdays,” she said. “To realize that there are kids out there that don’t even get a cake on their birthday was just something that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend as a mother. So for me to be able to do this for a child and their parents is just amazing.”

People who want to take part can either drop items off at her house, or purchase from an Amazon “wish list” that Skoros creates whenever she does a collection. That way, they can purchase something that is delivered to her house.

“I was blown away, the first time we did it, by how many donations we got and how quickly the community responded to us,” she said. “And the items just keep coming.”

The Skoroses organize collections three or four times a year, usually with one large one in the summer, but people can drop items off year-round.

“I just love seeing how everybody is so grateful that we coordinate this collection, and they’re always so happy that we do it,” Skoros said. “This is an East Meadow-wide effort.”