A Day to Remember to Be Grateful

For many families, Thanksgiving is a day where families come together to enjoy a huge delicious dinner complete with turkey and all the trimmings. However, for a lot of families, Thanksgiving is a time of despair and stress because putting regular food on the table is a struggle, let alone a huge turkey dinner. 

For the past five years, West Valley Community Services (WVCS) has been meeting that gap for many families by distributing Thanksgiving food baskets, delivering pre-made turkey dinners to home-bound families, and coordinating a huge family event at Bowlmor Lanes. This event allows families to leave their worries behind for one day, enjoy the company of their families and delight in a delicious lunch complete with all the traditional Thanksgiving fare – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. 

To see the joy in their faces is enough to know that these types of events are important, which is why when we learned that Bowlmor Lanes couldn’t host the annual Thanksgiving event this year, we knew that we had to come up with another plan. There was no other option.

The very next day, BlueLight Cinemas, a local family-owned premium discount theater stepped up and generously offered to host our Thanksgiving event by screening three movies for more than 300 of our clients. In addition, several other businesses, community groups, and individuals offered donations of food and money to help with preparing a brown bag Thanksgiving lunch for our families to take home. 

One of these partners, Evergreen Solutions LLC came to the rescue after learning that WVCS was scrambling to find donations when a scheduled partnership fell through.

The founder/owner of Evergreen Solutions LLC, Faiz Syed, expresses, “We believe that businesses have the social responsibility to contribute to the local communities and we are looking forward to a long-term partnership with West Valley Community Services.” The very generous donation by Evergreen Solutions LLC enabled us to purchase the turkey sandwiches needed in the lunch.

Other groups that generously donated to the event include the Los Gatos Interfaith Clergy Association, Cakes4Kids, the Cupertino Education Association as well as many neighborhood and parent groups. And thanks to a story that ran across several Patch sites, we’ve gotten monetary donations as well to help underwrite the cost of the turkey sandwiches.

Thanksgiving is a perfect time to stop for a moment once a year and remember to give thanks. It's a time to be grateful for one's health, family, friends, job, home and having food on the table. All of us at WVCS are thankful for the kindness, compassion, and generosity of spirit that the community has shown to us and our clients which allows us once again to bring hope to our families at least one day this year.

Evergreen Solutions LLC is an electronic waste (e-waste) recycling business located in San Mateo. It partners with businesses, the community, households and individuals in safely recycling old, unused or broken electronics. To learn more about Evergreen Solutions LLC, please visit: www.evergsl.com or call Faiz Syed at (408) 599-7470.

West Valley Community Services is a non‐profit, community‐based agency that has been providing direct assistance and referral services to the West Valley for more than 35 years. WVCS serves more than 6,000 individuals and families annually in the West Valley communities of Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Cupertino, West San Jose and the surrounding mountain regions. For more information, visit www.wvcommunityservices.org.