Hope for the holiday's" Toy Drive/Toy Run
Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 8:30 AM · Walmart Chicopee, 591 Memorial Dr · Chicopee, Massachusetts
About this event
Bruce Rivest rang the fundraising office at Mercy Medical Center because of where he came from. He had been adopted out of Brightside in 1970, and when the question was which children's charity a toy run should carry, that was the one he already had a claim on. Being adopted from them in 1970, he said, he thought it was important to give them a call.
The drive he presides over is one of the oldest of its kind in western Massachusetts — the thirty-seventh ran in 2023 — and it takes a whole weekend rather than a morning. Friday and Saturday are spent collecting at the Walmart on Memorial Drive, seven in the morning until seven at night, toys and gift cards and cash. The ride is the Sunday: kickstands up at eleven, a short run from that car park to Mercy Medical Center on Carew Street in Springfield. One new unwrapped toy per rider is the whole fee. What Brightside cannot use goes to Lorraine's Soup Kitchen in Chicopee.
The charity's own line runs back to November 1873 and four Sisters of Charity who came down from Kingston, Ontario at a Holyoke priest's request. The picture is simpler than that: hundreds of bikes leaving a supermarket car park with a toy strapped to each one.
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