Sara Hohenthal celebrated the advent of her fourth year of life in typical birthday fashion: after collecting gifts from her family, a squad of smiling playmates treated her with birthday caroling, cake and more bow-wrapped presents — some purchased hesitantly by budget-pressed parents.

On each birthday since her fourth, nine-year-old Sara has celebrated a bit differently. For her special day, relatives still surprise her with presents packaged in colorful boxes and bags, but her friends now arrive at her parties bearing canned corn and vegetable soup.

Sara is a member of The Birthday Club, a program her mother, Kate Darcy Hohenthal, developed to encourage people nationwide to propel their birthday celebrations into non-perishable food drives for local pantries.

“The Birthday Club is a free program for adults and children to use their birthdays to help other people,” says Ms. Hohenthal of Manchester, Conn. “It’s based on the idea that we couldn’t have [Sara] getting 15 or 20 more presents on top of gifts from family. Also, a lot of kids get invited to a lot of parties, but they can’t afford to spend $10 or $15 on a gift for every party.”

“There is so much need. So we thought, maybe there is a way to redirect the gifts.”

Ms. Hohenthal launched The Birthday Club to a group of about 30 adults and children, with the unveiling of the program Web site, thebirthdayclub.net, and a half-sheet cake iced with pale yellow and blue balloons and flower blossoms at the West Tisbury Library on Saturday.

The Web site includes a listing of pantries, party invitation and thank-you note designs, and sample party and collection themes for adult, child and pet birthdays, including Italian dinner, dessert and pet food.

“My son Matthew just had his eighth birthday in June and he received 17 brown shopping bags of groceries,” Kate says. “Based on the average amount of groceries that families consume, four families had groceries for one week.”

Matthew included this statistic in the text of his thank-you cards sent to friends who contributed to the collection. Matthew says he is not disappointed when his playmates arrive at his birthday parties without wrapped toys and games because his family provides him with a sufficient number of gifts.

“We get presents, but we don’t get so many that we don’t have time to play with them all,” explains petite, strawberry-blonde Sara.

The Birthday Club encourages people to regard their birthdays as opportunities to give to people in need, but not necessarily as an alternative to traditional celebratory gift giving. Sara and Matthew request that their party guests offer them food pantry donations instead of birthday gifts, but Ms. Hohenthal stresses that people can participate in The Birthday Club and still receive gifts, by asking their guests for non-perishable foods in addition to presents.

“For us, we want [our children] to focus on the relationships and the fun times [with their friends] on birthdays,” Kate says. “But there are many ways to do this. Children can still enjoy birthday gifts from friends [while benefitting from] collecting for the pantry.”

Ms. Hohenthal has been advocating food drive birthdays by word-of-mouth for seven years. In 2006, she began tracking the impact of her scheme in Manchester by requesting pantry donors to indicate when they had collected food through The Birthday Club.

“I’m a doctoral student, so I like data,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t just go with it. Once I found out that it was successful, we really started to really promote it.”

The Birthday Club membership is not constrained by geographical boundaries. Anyone with access to a food pantry may participate.

Ms. Hohenthal chose to launch the program on the Vineyard, the destination of her family’s yearly weeklong summer vacations, because the Island Food Pantry is excitedly supportive of the idea.

“When I read the newspaper here, I see the outreach,” she explains. “There’s a community here on the Island that is really active. It’s the people helping the people. There’s a level of engagement in a very confined area that makes the Vineyard sort of an ideal place to launch The Birthday Club.”

Since the Vineyard in summer is a hub for vacationers — she and her children spotted license plates from 37 states on their annual visit this summer — the Island also appealed as a launch location to Ms. Hohenthal because she hopes out-of-towners will bring the concept home with them and help the program blossom.

Coordinator of the Island Food Pantry Armen Hanjian says that job cuts on the Vineyard have boosted the number of Islanders in need. The staff stocks the pantry shelves with food purchased with government funds more than food donations, a reality that Mr. Hanjian would like to see changed. The staff, he says, is always happy to accept nutritious and unexpired non-perishable food donations.

“It’s not just a matter of people having enough food, it’s having good food,” he says. “If you don’t have good food, then you don’t have good health.”

Mr. Hanijan has seen about a handful of Islanders unknowingly participate in The Birthday Club over the last few years. They are mostly adults and seniors, he says, who choose to celebrate their birthdays charitably by collecting food donations instead of gifts.

“Some people just need to be made aware of the possibility,” Mr. Hanjian says. “Everyone knows kids who have more toys than they can use. When they forsake the toys to do something they think might be helping someone, there’s more joy in that.”