Hundreds of Sunderland families enjoy a free festive fun day at the Beacon of Light thanks to Gentoo

Housing Association Gentoo invited its residents to enjoy a festive family fun day.

Transcript

00:00Are you looking forward to Christmas and getting some toys?

00:02Would you like a little treat from Santa?

00:05Just a little some chocolates?

00:07Yeah?

00:08Yeah?

00:09Just those?

00:12There you go my darling.

00:13You take those and be a good boy.

00:15Do you want any photographs?

00:31Okay Louise, obviously you've got your family fun day here today.

00:33So what are some of the things the kids and the families can do then?

00:36We've put on this family fun day today for all of our customers to basically get involved and celebrate Christmas.

00:42This is a space painting, there's lots of sport activities.

00:45We're really appreciative of the Beacon of Light for putting this on for us as well.

00:49We're working with Culture Start as well as Barclays Bank are here to support as well.

00:54So there's loads of activities for the kids.

00:56There's free lunch and also Santa's Grotto.

01:00So all of the kids are getting something to take away with them today from our own Gentoo Santa.

01:06I know you also did one in the summer, so what's the rationale behind these days then?

01:10This is the second family fun day that we've had this year.

01:13We had one in the summer which was a huge success.

01:16We had more people, about 1,200, who were due to turn up today.

01:20The idea is that Gentoo has 60,000 customers in Sunderland.

01:24So we are a big part of the Sunderland community and we just really want to support our customers as much as we possibly can.

01:31So doing something like this is really important to us and we're going to continue to do this.

01:35If this is what our customers want us to do, we'll continue to do this in 2025.

01:54.