One Hot Day of Caring

When the vans and cars started showing up at the Salvation Army on Foster Street at 11 a.m. Wednesday, 12 volunteers were ready. They unloaded food boxes either into grocery carts or onto hand trucks.

Once inside the building, volunteers sorted the goodies in those boxes, the pasta, vegetables, canned chili, canned tuna fish, cereal, and a hundred other food items into baskets for later distribution.

In all more than two tons of food were donated by people around western Connecticut for distribution Wednesday.

“We go and help and we ask about what they need,” said Virginia Tee, who works in research and development with Proctor & Gamble’s Duracell division in Bethel’s Berkshire Corporate Park. Earlier in the morning, Tee and other volunteers mulched the front area of the Salvation Army and the side area. Other workers replaced or varnished ceiling tiles and others sorted food.

Suddenly, it’s a story about numbers. More than 600 volunteers from 28 companies worked on 50 projects at non-profits and charity organizations in Western Connecticut. More than $150,000 was donated in time and food during the Western Connecticut United Way Days of Caring event on Wednesday. Kimberly Clark alone donated more than 700 pounds of diapers and toilet paper for distribution.

At the Salvation Army, the volunteers were from Duracell, a division of Proctor & Gamble, a firm that fielded 35 volunteers in Danbury and New Milford for the day.

Those volunteers could just have easily been from the Union Savings Bank, Savings Bank of Danbury, Kimberly Clark, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Belimo, Cartus, Goodrich, the Taunton Press, Trident or other firms who put volunteers in the field Wednesday.

The volunteers worked at the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, CACD, Catholic Charities, Amos House, Danbury Youth Services and Regional Hospice, among others.

“They’re not going to be replacing their ceiling tiles,” said Dan DeLacey, another United Way volunteer, who also works at Proctor & Gamble in Bethel. DeLacey worked Wednesday morning at the Red Cross in Bethel, cleaning seven emergency vehicles. “They never get cleaned. They don’t have the time.”

“It’s a sense of being able to give back,” said John O’Leary, a volunteer at the Salvation Army from Proctor & Gamble. “Maybe it gets us out of the office for a few hours, but we can lend a hand to those who are less fortunate. It is so needed in this economic climate with the unemployment where it is.”