Tulane's toy drive aims to make kids in foster care feel welcome

BILOXI -- Tony Alves is a Gulfport police sergeant, a Tulane University student and a foster parent.

So when the school's Mississippi Coast campus began a service project to donate toys to foster children, he was asked to help. He readily agreed.

Friday morning, he and fellow students Carrie Tucker, Elisha Brooks, Erika Reynolds and Jennifer Spicer gathered to load and deliver boxes of donated toys, clothes, diapers, strollers and bikes.

"This is really important because when children come into a foster home they don't have much," he said. "This will make it more homey when they get there.

"They're being taken away from one situation, they don't know the people, they don't know how long they'll be there. In a couple weeks, they might be handed a teddy bear and they could keep it for who knows how long."

The response to the service project was tremendous, everyone involved agreed. Students donated basketballs and dolls, and in addition to toys they began to donate toiletries and other items they figured foster children might need in a new home.

The gifts, delivered to the R.O.C.K. (Resilience of Coastal Kids) Foundation, will go to children in Harrison and Hancock counties.

"The goal is to make them feel welcome," Alves said. "Whether they're there for a weekend or two weeks or however long, you want them to feel like they're important."

Alves and his wife began fostering because they wanted to adopt a child. The first children they took in, two boys, stayed with them for 13 months. They've fostered five or six children over the years, even after they had two of their own.

This story was originally published December 11, 2015 at 9:23 PM with the headline "Tulane's toy drive aims to make kids in foster care feel welcome ."