Gale is committed to helping the communities in which we live by providing resources to a variety of charitable, volunteer, and educational organizations. To encourage and support generosity and community involvement, Gale offers employees one paid Volunteer Day per calendar year.
As a new employee of Gale, and with the holidays approaching, I (along with a few colleagues and several family members & friends) decided to take advantage of this rewarding offer. We decided to work with Higher Hopes!, a Detroit based company with the brave mission of providing full Thanksgiving meals to low-income households and weekly summer meal kits to low-income families whose children are in enrolled in Detroit Head Start programs.
We began our adventure the Saturday just before Thanksgiving by packing cardboard boxes with a variety of Thanksgiving necessities including spices, flour, chicken stock, canned veggies, and more. Although this seems like a menial task, there were nearly 1,000 boxes that needed to be packaged that morning. After making an assembly line to quicken the work (Henry Ford would be proud), we paired up in teams of two and began working. Each team was assigned an item that needed to be unpackaged from pallets and the individual items be placed into the boxes for the families. 60 volunteers (not all from Gale) and just two short hours later, the job was finished…but only until Monday.
When Monday finally arrived, we met at The Order of the Fisherman Ministry in Detroit to pass out the boxes of food we worked so hard to assemble. Higher Hopes! did a fantastic job setting up “stations,” each with a different food item we were handing out. There were the boxes we put together, potato bags, apple bags, pop, and turkeys—65 lbs of food for each family— to have a proper Thanksgiving meal.
As the last meal was delivered and the volunteers started cleaning the area to leave, I couldn’t help but feel proud of myself and coworkers for all of the efforts put forth and Gale, for encouraging this life-changing event. Seeing and hearing the appreciation from the families made volunteering more than worth it.
Take a look at what the founder of Higher Hopes! has to say about Gale and all of the fun we had volunteering!
Air Max 1“Gale is such a wonderful company! The people are so impressive and do so much outside of their regular work to help the community’s less fortunate by donating their time and also helping to raise funds to make life better for so many. I was introduced to Gale by my son Adam who worked as an intern this past summer. He loved his job and the people he worked with and he learned so much from such a supportive group of Gale team Members. I met many of them at the Higher Hopes! Thanksgiving food distribution where Gale team members helped distribute 1,000 full Thanksgiving meal kits to 1,000 families with children enrolled in Head Start programs in the city of Detroit. Amazing people with amazing ambition to help so many. I can’t thank you all enough for your help and your passion as well as all the big smiles that I saw from all that helped.”
William Birndorf, founder, Higher Hopes!
Good to read the blog! I know it feels so great to be a part of volunteering. Volunteering is one of the best way to serve your help to the needy communities. Last Christmas, I too have participated in a volunteering program for helping needy people in slum areas. There, I met someone who told me about mission humanitaire volunteering program to help the community at abroad by registering on this site http://www.mission-humanitaire-afrique.org/ in volunteering abroad program.