Toys for Tots: Donation Locations
UPDATE: The site has been updated for 2018.
The St. Louis area is home to many needy children, and also many charitable citizens. There are hundreds of local businesses and organizations taking part in the Toys for Tots program this holiday season. Finding those businesses and organizations that accept toy donations just got easier.
Toys for Tots mission is to provide toys, books, and other gifts to less fortunate children during the holidays. Last year the St. Louis chapter distributed gifts to over 37,000 children. This year we can do even better.
OpenSTL leveraged open source software to create a mobile-friendly location-based tool that displays the nearest toy donation sites. In addition to the St. Louis area, the tool supports the entire United States, which is over 19,000 drop off locations.
To get started, simply click here, enter in your zip code and click search. Clicking on any of the map pins will show you the organizations name and address, in addition to their hours of operation and dates they accept toy donations.
Technology
The front end code is based off of Derek Eder’s Searchable Map Template. Back end code was written in PHP using the web crawling library Gouette. Data storage and geocoding are provided by Google Fusion Tables.
Originally published at www.johnkramlich.com
