About Bobby's Brigade

It started with a bag of outgrown toys

Bobby's Brigade began the way a lot of good things do: small, and close to home. As a young boy in Alamo, California, Bobby started collecting toys he'd outgrown to send to children at the Open Arms Mission in Mexico — photographing each hand-painted box on its journey so the kids donating could see the joy on the other end.

That habit of noticing who needed something, and doing something about it, didn't stop there.

Then he heard the bears had run out

Through a family friend connected to the California Highway Patrol, Bobby learned that officers used to carry teddy bears in their vehicles — a small comfort for children separated from an injured parent while officers secured an accident scene. The funding for that program had dried up.

Bobby decided to bring it back himself. What began as a personal project turned into an ongoing partnership with CHP — supplying more than 18,000 care packages across California over Bobby's 13 years of service so far.

In 2018, Bobby's Brigade also supplied care packages to first-responder vehicles in five other states: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, and New York. That expansion ran for one year — without the marketing reach to sustain interest in those states, the ongoing program has stayed focused on California ever since.