Every year, somewhere around late October, a message lands in a Melbourne office group chat. Someone has volunteered to organise the Christmas party. There is a spreadsheet. There is a venue with a minimum spend. There is a Kris Kringle with a $25 cap, and a quiet collective sigh, because everyone remembers last year’s novelty socks and the scented candle that nobody wanted.

Here is the thing. We are not here to cancel your Christmas party. Please, have the party! Your team has worked hard, and celebrating together matters more than people admit, especially in a city that has been through as much as Melbourne has these past few years.

What we are suggesting is smaller and simpler than that. With one conversation and about 20 minutes of planning, your workplace can turn a portion of its festive spend into something that genuinely changes a person’s year, if not their entire life! No committee. No lengthy approval chain. No reinventing your entire corporate social responsibility strategy in December.

Let us walk through how.

Why December Matters So Much

For most workplaces, December means winding down. For services like MOSS, December means winding up.

The end of the year puts enormous pressure on people who are already stretched thin. Rent falls due at the same time as school holiday costs. Casual and insecure work dries up over the shutdown period. Family tensions rise, and so does family violence, which remains one of the leading drivers of homelessness for women and children in Victoria. Support services reduce their hours, offices close, and the systems people rely on become harder to reach exactly when they need them most.

Homelessness in Victoria has not eased. Rental affordability across Melbourne and the northern suburbs sits at historic lows, and the gap between what people earn and what a modest rental cost continues to widen. Behind those statistics sit real people, many of whom have worked their whole lives and never imagined they would be facing housing insecurity in their fifties, sixties or seventies.

So when your workplace redirects even a modest amount of festive spending, it arrives at the precise moment it does the most good.

Option 1: Redirect the Kris Kringle

This is the easiest change you will make all year!

Take the standard Secret Santa budget, multiply it by the number of participants, and give that total instead. A team of twenty with a $25 cap becomes a $500 donation. A team of eighty becomes $2,000. Nobody buys anything, nobody wraps anything, and nobody has to pretend to love a mug with a pun on it.

If your team enjoys the ritual of gift-giving too much to abandon it entirely, try a hybrid. Halve the cap and donate the difference. Or keep the exchange but make it a “regifting round”, where everyone brings something genuinely nice they already own and unused, and the money that would have been spent goes to MOSS instead.

Best practice tip: make participation opt-out rather than opt-in and be genuinely relaxed about people opting out. Some colleagues are managing their own financial pressures, and nobody should feel awkward about that in front of the team. A simple line in the email works well. “We are redirecting the Kris Kringle budget this year. Contribute if you can, and no questions asked if this year is not the year.”

Option 2: Add a donation line to the party spend

This one is almost invisible, and it scales beautifully!

When your finance team signs off on the venue, the catering and the drinks package, add a line item for community contribution. Somewhere between 2-5% of the total party budget is the sweet spot. It rarely triggers a second look at approval stage, and on a $15,000 event it delivers between $300 and $750.

Larger organisations often go further and match whatever staff contribute. Matching is powerful because it changes the psychology of giving. A colleague who might have put in $20 will happily put in $50 when they know it doubles. Announce the match before the party, not after, and watch the number climb.

A word on the finance side. Donations of $2 and over to organisations with deductible gift recipient status are tax deductible in Australia. That makes the donation line one of the easier conversations you will have with your finance manager, particularly if there is unspent budget sitting in the account as the year closes.

Option 3: Put a giving tree in the foyer

If your workplace wants something visible, tactile and a bit joyful, the giving tree is hard to beat!

Set up a tree through November and December in reception or the kitchen, hang tags with specific practical items, and let people take a tag and bring the item back. The visibility is the point. People walk past it every day, they see it filling up, and something quietly shifts in the culture of the office.

The critical detail is what goes on the tags. This is where good intentions often go astray, so be specific, and ask us first.

What genuinely helps:

• Supermarket and department store gift cards, in any denomination. These are the single most useful thing you can give, because they let people choose for themselves. Dignity matters enormously.
• New bedding, towels and pillows.
• Toiletries and personal care items, including sanitary products.
• Kitchen starter packs for people moving into a new tenancy. Think cutlery, plates, pots, a kettle, a toaster.
• Phone credit and prepaid SIM cards, which keep people connected to services, employers and family.
• Cleaning products and laundry basics, which are rarely donated and always needed.

What creates more work than it solves:

• Used clothing and bric-a-brac. Sorting, storing and disposing of unusable donations costs services time and money.
• Perishable food, unless arranged directly with us in advance.
• Large furniture without prior discussion, because storage is genuinely limited.

Give people a deadline that is at least a week before your party, so there is time to sort and distribute everything before Christmas.

Option 4: Give the client gifts a purpose

If your business sends hampers or bottles to clients each December, consider a donation made in their name instead, with a card explaining where the money went.

Clients increasingly notice this sort of thing. Procurement teams ask about social impact. Values-led purchasing is no longer a niche concern. A card that says “We have supported Victorians experiencing homelessness on your behalf this year” lands very differently from a hamper that goes straight into the office kitchen and disappears by Wednesday.

Option 5: Turn the raffle into a fundraiser

Most Christmas parties already have a raffle or a prize draw somewhere in the run sheet. You have the audience, the microphone and the goodwill. All you need to do is change where the ticket money goes.

Ask three or four suppliers, clients or local businesses to donate a prize. Most say yes, because it costs them very little and it puts their name in front of a friendly room. A hamper from your caterer, a voucher from the café downstairs, a weekend away from the client who owes you a favour. Sell tickets in the fortnight beforehand rather than on the night, so people who cannot attend can still take part.

Best practice tip: Run the draw early in the evening, before the drinks package has done its work. Announce the running total from the stage and then announce it again in the Monday morning email. A room that has just watched itself raise $1,800 in twenty minutes tends to want to do it again next year.

A quick note on the rules. Small workplace raffles in Victoria generally fall under minor gaming provisions and do not require a permit when tickets are low value and proceeds go to a not-for-profit purpose, but it pays to have someone check the current guidance from the Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission before you print the tickets.

Option 6: Shift the party itself

This one asks a little more of your team, and it gives back more too.

Instead of the standard venue booking, spend the first half of the day volunteering together and the second half celebrating. Packing hampers, assembling kitchen starter packs, sorting donated goods or preparing welcome kits for people moving into new tenancies. Then head out for lunch afterwards, with something real to talk about.

Teams consistently report that these days land differently from the usual party. People who barely speak across departments end up side by side packing boxes. Conversations happen that would never happen over canapés. And the day costs less, because you have replaced half a venue hire with something more meaningful.

Be honest about the logistics. Good corporate volunteering takes preparation on our side, so give us six to eight weeks of notice, keep groups to a size we can genuinely host, and be open to doing the task that is actually useful rather than the one that photographs best. Volunteering that creates work for a service is not really a gift. We will tell you straight what helps.

Option 7: Give your team the choice with workplace giving

If you want something that outlasts December, set up workplace giving before the year ends.

Workplace giving lets staff contribute a small amount from each pay, pre-tax, so the benefit arrives immediately rather than at tax time. Someone donating $20 a fortnight sees roughly $13 or $14 leave their take-home pay, depending on their marginal rate. Most modern payroll systems handle it in a few clicks, and January is the ideal moment to launch, because people are thinking about the year ahead and the new financial habits that come with it.

The reason we love this one is simple. Regular giving is the most valuable support a service like MOSS can receive. It lets us forecast, plan programmes properly and keep experienced workers in roles rather than losing them to short-term funding cycles. Twenty people giving $10 a fortnight delivers more than $10,000 across a year, and it arrives steadily, in March and August as well as December.

Best practice tip: Announce it at the Christmas party while the goodwill is high and make signing up a thirty-second job with a QR code on the table. If your organisation can match contributions, say so on the night. Matched workplace giving typically lifts participation dramatically, and it sends a clear signal that the company is in this alongside its people rather than simply asking them to chip in.

The 20-minute checklist

Bring this to your next team meeting. You can work through the whole thing before the biscuits run out.

• Pick one thing. Kris Kringle redirect, donation line, giving tree or client gifts. One is plenty. Do not try to do all four in your first year.

• Set a number. Decide the amount or the percentage now, in the room, while everyone is present. Vague intentions die in December.

• Name an owner. One person, with the authority to actually action it. Not a committee.

• Check with finance. A two-line email confirming the budget code and the tax-deductible receipt process.

• Get in touch with MOSS. Our team can help you every step of the way with practical support for your project! We can also confirm what is most needed right now, sort out delivery or collection, and make sure your contribution lands where it counts.

• Tell your team, warmly. Explain the why, keep participation optional, and make it easy.

• Set the deadline. One week before the party, so there is time to deliver.

• Share the outcome. Report back in January with the final figure and what it funded. This is the step most workplaces skip, and it is the one that turns a nice gesture into an annual tradition.

The Part That Matters Most

A one-off Christmas donation does real good. We are grateful for every single one.

But if your workplace enjoys this, we would love to talk about what comes next. Regular, predictable support lets us plan properly, employ the right people and commit to programmes that run beyond December. The families we work with do not experience housing insecurity seasonally, and the most valuable partnerships we have are the ones that show up in March and July as well.

So have the party. Enjoy the long lunch and the terrible dance floor and the group photo that someone will use as their profile picture for the next four years!

Just take 20 minutes first. Redirect the Secret Santa, add the line to the budget, put the tree in the foyer. Then walk into the new year knowing that your celebration helped somebody else find a safe place to have one of their own. 

We’ve worked with businesses of all sizes on their charity initiatives, from Bunnings and Public Transport Victoria to Viva Energy Australia and Zib Digital! We’re here to work alongside your team to shape a partnership that fits your goals, whether that means employee engagement, brand visibility, or a genuine social impact story you can share with confidence. Our team handles the practical side, from setting up workplace giving and supplying campaign materials to reporting back on exactly where your support went and who it helped. You get a trusted local partner, meaningful staff involvement, and measurable community outcomes your customers will notice.

Ready to get started? Get in touch with the MOSS team and we will make it simple.