Help from Goodfellows a blessing for widow with 2 young children

Marquesa is a personal care assistant, helping others be more comfortable during difficult moments in their lives. However, she recently lost her husband to natural causes.

Now she has found herself also needing a little extra care — especially this time of year when it comes to providing holiday gifts for her two young children.

“It had always been a two-parent household, but now I’m alone in trying to make sure my kids are taken care of, getting their education, I’m doing everything myself,” she said. “It’s a breather to get anything to help.”

The Goodfellow Fund is providing such a breather. Thanks to the Star-Telegram charity that has been helping families in need for more than a century, children such as Marquesa’s are receiving $100 gift cards to Old Navy this holiday season.

“I didn’t know how I was going to pay for Christmas. I just wanted something to make them happy,” she said. “It is such a blessing.”

Marquesa has plans to return to school and become a nurse, following in her mother’s path.

“My mom was a traveling nurse. It was embedded in me,” she said. “I’m not giving up. I’m going to navigate that as well and make a better life for myself and my children.”

About the Goodfellow Fund

The story on the Goodfellow website describes its beginning as an offshoot of the first newspaper charity drive in the United States, started by the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 10, 1909. A Chicago city attorney wrote a letter challenging his friends to donate the money they would have spent on holiday partying to charity.

A couple of years later, the Advertising Club of Fort Worth staged the first local Goodfellow campaign. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1912, Publisher Amon G. Carter brought the tradition to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

To donate online and find out more, visit goodfellowfundfw.com/donate. To donate with a check, send checks made out to the Goodfellow Fund to P.O. Box 149, Fort Worth, TX, 76101.