When Reed Marcum was just a kid, he learned that some children in his town of McAlester Oklahoma didn’t have any toys under their Christmas tree.
He is a shy kid who was bullied in school and remembered the moment very clearly, since he was no stranger to feeling left out. Even though his parents divorced when he was just 7, there were people who stepped in to make Christmas time special, so the thought of his fifth-grade friends with nothing under the tree was tough to hear.
He proposed to his mother that he hold a toy drive and Reed’s mother, Angie, posted a video on Facebook explaining her son’s intentions, and asked for donations of toys or money to buy toys for a giveaway.
That was all 7 years ago, and now as a university freshman, Reed still drives two-and-a-half hours home from his campus in Stillwater to participate in the annual toy drive; now in its seventh edition.
54,000 toys so far have been given out to kids in McAlester, which has a poverty rate of 24% so Reed continues paying forward, as he sees it, the kindness his family received more than a decade ago by starting other charitable programs starting with his mom when he was just 11 years old.