Formby residents create 1,300 special festive Christmas gift boxes for Liberia

Kind hearted Formby residents have helped to create more than 1,300 special festive Christmas giftboxes which have been sent to Liberia.

The Shoebox Express is a not-for-profit project which makes it easy, fun and inexpensive for members of the local community to participate in the many charity Christmas shoebox schemes that local schools, churches and organisations support. The scheme was set up 10 years ago, operating mostly from Formby and Crosby, and now helps to produce more than 1,200 shoeboxes annually.

This year, a total of 1,306 were made, An 11 year old from Formby was thrilled to find out that a greeting card he drew last year inspired the Christmas project’s 2017 poster.

Tim Waters, who now attends Formby High School, was a pupil at Trinity St Peter’s school when they created Christmas cards for the Shoebox Express last October.

The charity’s logo is a train and when the organisers of the project were considering new posters, they remembered Tim’s greetings card, which highlighted what is put into the boxes, what happens to the donations and where they are sent.

After some digging, they traced Tim and worked with him to tweak his elf-workshop idea to create an easy-to-understand railway network diagram poster for this year’s appeal!