There is a particular kind of loss that only a child can fully measure. It is rarely the loss of anything valuable in the way adults count value, but of something that was simply theirs: a blanket, a book, a small box of toy soldiers kept close through a childhood that offered little else to hold onto.
For Holly Wood, it was the soldiers. Having spent time in foster care as a child, Holly owned very little that truly belonged to him, and the box of toy soldiers he treasured was among the few exceptions. When it was taken from him, it was never returned. He carried that memory into adulthood, and in 1994, when Variety WA received a request to provide toys for children arriving at domestic violence shelters with nothing, it was Holly who took up the task.
What he built became Toy Bank.
More than 30 years on, the toy soldier remains the program’s enduring symbol, though it was never meant as decoration. It stands instead for the understanding Holly brought to the work from the very beginning: that for a child who has lost almost everything, one small object of their own can carry a weight out of all proportion to its size.
Toy Bank collects new toys and distributes them to children arriving at refuges, crisis accommodation services and community organisations across Western Australia, many of them having left unsafe homes because of family and domestic violence or acute family crisis. They arrive carrying whatever could be gathered in the time they had. Often that is very little, and rarely is it a toy.
Every toy that passes through Toy Bank is new and unwrapped, and the distinction matters more than it might first appear. A second-hand toy, however kindly meant, is something passed on; a new one is something chosen. For a child whose circumstances have been decided almost entirely by others, being chosen is no small thing.
Variety WA Chief Executive Officer Chris Chatterton puts it plainly. “A toy will never undo what a child has experienced, but it can offer comfort, familiarity and a sense of dignity at a time when almost everything familiar may have been left behind,” he said. “For a child arriving at a refuge or crisis accommodation service, a new toy is not just a gift. It is something that belongs to them. Something that says they have not been forgotten.”
This year, for the first time, Toy Bank has also moved into the workplace. Collection boxes now stand in office foyers across Perth, each beside its cardboard soldier, inviting staff to give a toy or scan to donate as they come and go. We grateful to our corporate partners for opening their doors as our first hosts. Every toy collected is distributed to children through crisis accommodation services and community organisations across Western Australia, children who live in our suburbs and our regional towns, and some of whom will arrive somewhere unfamiliar this summer with nothing of their own.
Holly Wood never got his soldiers back. What he gave instead, to thousands of WA children over three decades, was the thing he had gone without: a small object that was theirs alone, and with it the quiet assurance that someone had thought of them.
Australian Charity Number CC20294
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