Saturday, August 23, 2008

Saving Thanksgiving...

One gently used cell phone at a time!!

I know what you’re thinking right now… Really, I do! You’re wondering how much time I’ve been spending with my super cool margarita machine!

Trust me. The above statement will all make sense in just a few minutes.

A little back story…

About a year and a half ago, the department I work in decided that we wanted to start giving a little bit back to our community. After doing some research and taking a vote, we chose to contact our local Ronald McDonald House (http://www.colrmhc.org/) to see what we could do to help them out. Every 2-3 months since, we have made a delivery to the House of donated items such as baked goods, cleaning supplies, bathroom tissue, toys/books for the kids, etc. It’s been a lot of fun and it's nice to know we’re helping… even if it’s just a little bit.

Last October, we decided to do a “treat” delivery to the House. This delivery included TONS of baked goodies, candy, trick-or-treat bags, coloring books, and crayons. The volunteers at the House were so excited to see us! While we were there putting away the donated items, Pete (the volunteer coordinator for the House) came to us with quite a situation on his hands. He told us that due to some financial difficulty, the vendor that normally provides the House with their Thanksgiving turkeys was not going to be able to donate. He was pretty stressed and asked if there was anything we could do to help. I told him to give us a couple of days and I’d see what we could do.

As it turns out, we had been collecting gently used cell phones at work, and were planning to send them in to a company by the name of PaceButler (http://www.pacebutler.com/) for cash. We were planning on using any money we received from the cell phones towards supplies for the House for Christmas. Instead, we just sped our plans up a bit and were able to provide 20 turkeys for the Thanksgiving dinner which fed 44 families and a few volunteers!

This year, we are hoping to be able to do the same thing again! The only catch this year is that the Ronald McDonald House has moved to a brand new, much larger facility which now houses 86 families!! That’s more than double what they had last year.

This is where you come in!

If you, or someone you know, have a gently used cell phone laying around that you would like to get rid of… Please let me know! We are collecting the phones through October 14th, and will ship them to PaceButler on October 15th. It’s going to take quite a few phones to feed 86 families, so the more we’re able to send in, the better!

If you’re interested, please leave me a comment with your e-mail address and I will provide you with a mailing address to which you can send your phone.

**Every penny we receive from PaceButler will go directly toward the Ronald McDonald House.**

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