It’s our favorite time of the year to give back to our community and bring smiles to children’s faces. Our tradition of making nearly 1,000 toy bags continued this year!
Nadine Palmer, Human Resources Coordinator at William B. Meyer, Inc., has organized this event for the last couple of years. She believes that every child has an artistic ability that should be encouraged to flourish. When deciding on the toys and activities for the bags this year, she selected items to help cultivate and develop that creativity and imagination. The bags included puzzles, sketch books, colored pencils, and watercolor sets, among other items.
Team members from all of our service offerings and departments came together and assembled the gift bags. We hand selected and packed each bag with care while listening to holiday music and drinking hot chocolate.
Over the course of one week our team also assembled fleece blankets. During our build-a-blanket event we made over 100 blankets during that week! This year we also made scarves to be paired with gloves to donate to children.
We selected different local hospitals, children’s centers, and charitable organizations from our community to donate the toy bags, blankets, scarves and gloves. These include: Bridgeport Hospital in Bridgeport, CT, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, CT, Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA, Why Me & Sherry’s House in Worcester, MA, and the Shehan Center in Bridgeport, CT. Members from our team always enjoy handing out the bags and blankets to the children at the Shehan Center. It is a great privilege to be able to see the joy on their faces.
We also donated scarves and gloves to the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen at Christ Church. David O’Sullivan runs the kitchen at the New Haven Community Soup Kitchen and expressed gratitude: “these efforts of the William B. Meyer team are actually heroic. We have plenty of socks and hats at this time of year but very few gloves and scarves. You have truly made a difference.”
We’re already looking forward to continuing the tradition next year!
Click here to see our volunteers in action on our Facbook and see below for photos of the donations!
