The Twin Cities Geek Holiday Toy & Book Drive Plans for the Future

In 2015, we held the first #GiveTCG Twin Cities Geek Holiday Toy & Book Drive. With very little lead time, we set up 12 donation boxes at locations throughout the Minneapolis–St. Paul metro and were able to collect some 500 toys, books, and other donations for area families.

In the years that followed, our holiday drive grew to more than 60 participating locations, and we’ve collected more than 40,000 donations to date. This massive effort would not be possible without the dozens of wonderful stores, cafés, and organizations that have hosted donation boxes year after year or the legion of volunteers who deliver those boxes, pick up donations, sort items, and help in other ways. We’re so grateful for the relationships we’ve built with all these amazing people over the past nine years, and we look forward to continuing the drive for many years to come.

Some of the donations collected during a past Twin Cities Geek Holiday Toy & Book Drive.

This year, Twin Cities Geek marks its 10th year of existence. And as part of looking ahead to the future, we’re making some changes to our business structure. In order to become more independent as an organization, we’ve decided to end our formal relationship with Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, which has been in place since we incorporated as a nonprofit. This relationship has involved multiple parts of our business behind the scenes, but the largest and most visible has been Hallie Q. Brown being the primary partner and beneficiary of the holiday drive (the other recipient being the Women’s Prison Book Project).

Many factors informed this decision, and rest assured we’re parting ways amicably—we simply feel it’s what’s best for Twin Cities Geek. We’re currently in the process of deciding how holiday drive donations will be directed going forward; we’ll continue to collect books on behalf of the Women’s Prison Book Project, but we haven’t yet finalized what other organization(s) we will partner with to distribute donations.

To ensure that this transition is as smooth as possible for everyone, the Twin Cities Geek Holiday Drive is taking a hiatus for the 2024 holiday season.

This hiatus will give us some much-needed capacity to complete our strategic planning process. We truly hate to miss a year, and this is not a decision we made lightly, but it’s important to us that everything be well considered and thoroughly planned for a seamless entry into this new phase of the drive.

Our huge team of amazing volunteers makes this effort possible.

We’re currently evaluating candidates for new #GiveTCG Holiday Drive partner organizations. We plan to spend the next year finalizing our new partnership(s) and getting all the logistics in place. In particular, we are seeking a local organization or organizations that can:

• provide basic material support, including printing signage and donation boxes to place in stores
• receive deliveries of, and store, holiday drive donations in November and December
• distribute thousands of holiday drive toy and book donations without separating them by gender

If you have a relationship with a great local organization and you’d like to recommend them, please submit a nomination using our form!

We will still be signal-boosting the Black Friday sales and promotions of our previous donation locations, as we always do, along with other charitable efforts you can donate to in this interim year. If you’d like to be notified when Twin Cities Geek Holiday Drive donation opportunities start up again next year, join our Holiday Drive crew Facebook group.

We look forward to the next evolution of the Twin Cities Geek Holiday Drive in 2025!

We can’t wait to collect your donations again!