Nikki Thurston wakes up each day in the trailer she shares with her three children, two teenage daughters and a 4-year-old son.

Thurston raises her children alone. Though trained as a telecommunications technician, contract work is irregular. She estimates that in the 14 years since divorcing the father of her daughters, she has collected five years and 10 months of cash benefits from the Department of Social and Health Services. She’s collected unemployment twice.

With no car or license, work is harder than ever to come by. Even if she had those things, it would be difficult to get to a job interview because her state benefits only pay enough to live on, let alone gas, she said.

“You need a license to get a job, and a job to afford a license,” she said. “Once you’re in that hole, it’s hard to get out.”

Forced to spend most of her days in her trailer park neighborhood between Orting and Sumner. Thurston looked around and saw herself surrounded by people in similar situations. And she decided to do something about it.

Thurston is the founder and president of Our Shared Hopes, a nonprofit group formed this year to aid persons and families in need from Buckley, Sumner, Enumclaw, Bonney Lake and Orting. The organization’s first event will be a Christmas Day “French Toast Feed.”

For years, Thurston had the idea to travel to Seattle on Christmas Eve to hand out blankets to the homeless and serve them French toast.

“Even though I’m in an RV, at least I have a roof over my head,” she said. “So I was going to drag my daughters up there and grab a table and a griddle and go to town.”

But unemployment seemed to go hand-in-hand with the holiday season and Thurston was never able to make the trip.

In February, inspiration struck.

Thurston had joined Facebook after much urging from her daughters. In the process of building her social network, she reconnected with 200 old friends from White River High School.

“I started to wonder just how many of them were local, and might want to help me throw a French toast brunch on Christmas Day,” she said.

She posted a status update with the idea and received enough of a response that she decided to make Our Shared Hopes a reality.

The concept was to take Thurston’s desire for philanthropy local. She didn’t have to go to Seattle to see who was affected by poverty – she only needed to look out her front door.

The end of the month is the most difficult time for families receiving government assistance, she said, because the cash benefits start to run dry. Families go to their neighbors in the hopes of borrowing basic groceries like milk.

That makes the holidays particularly hard for families in need, given the social pressure to buy more food and gifts.

“People get depressed because they can’t do what other people can,” Thurston said. “Watching the kids is the hardest. They don’t understand Mom and Dad have no money to get them what they need or what they want.”

The French Toast Feed is planned to provide a holiday feast by providing a buffet-style breakfast for individuals and families. The feast will be at the Buckley Marion Grange, the managers of which donated the hall and $200 for the event. The donated money will be used to purchase gift cards for children in attendance.

The nonprofit picked up a board of directors, including Thurston’s best friend since high school, Jennifer Davis, as vice president. It officially incorporated in April and received a Master Business License in October. The license allows Our Shared Hopes to offer volunteer credit to high school students and apply for grant money.

Gaining support for the upstart organization has been slow going. A fundraising campaign of letters to large businesses resulted in just two responses, both of them letters of rejection. A handful of high school volunteers agreed to help, but not nearly as many as Thurston expected, given that they could offer credit for the culminating project. And so far only a few families neighboring Thurston have requested tickets.

With very little funding, Thurston has dipped into her own food stamps a bit each month to purchase ingredients for the feed.

“A little bit of attention is trickling in,” Thurston said. “Since it’s our first event, I don’t know if people take it seriously yet. After we hold the feed, I think more people will pay attention.”

For more information, contact Our Shared Hopes via their website at oursharedhopes.weebly.com.