A local company’s friendly internal competition went a long way
toward helping the needy of San Benito County this holiday
season.
Milgard Windows, as part of the KSBW Share Your Holiday food and
toy drive, raised almost 10,000 pounds of food for the local
chapter of the Salvation Army, said Kristin King, inside sales
supervisor at the company.
A local company’s friendly internal competition went a long way toward helping the needy of San Benito County this holiday season.
Milgard Windows, as part of the KSBW Share Your Holiday food and toy drive, raised almost 10,000 pounds of food for the local chapter of the Salvation Army, said Kristin King, inside sales supervisor at the company.
They also raised more than $3,000 to purchase toys and clothing for needy families and children.
This is the fourth year the company has been a sponsor of the fund-raiser and it was their best one to date, King said. They almost doubled their last year’s donation.
“We do all kinds of things to get our employees excited to bring in food to benefit (the community),” she said.
To get the company’s 352 employees excited, they held a raffle. Local merchants, service organizations and restaurants donated gifts to motivate employees to buy a raffle ticket and be part of the fund-raising, King said.
Merchants such as Tiffany Ford, Elegant Touch, The Vault, Ridgemark Golf Course and many others donated a combined total of $2,346 worth of prizes that were given away to employees who participated in the raffle.
The money from the raffle sales, which totaled $3,600, was used toward a shopping spree at Target to purchase as many toys and blankets their money would buy.
“We try to do anything we can to raise money for Hollister,” King said. “This is the biggest way that we can really give back to all the people who are needy – the families and the kids that don’t get toys at Christmas time.”
Within the company’s management hierarchy, small teams oversaw every aspect of the two-week long fund-raiser – marketing, collecting the items and then distributing the donations.
They also had someone solely in charge of the competition between the company’s different departments, said Plant Manager Sam Bailey.
“There’s a lot of competitive people that work here,” Bailey said. “They had a lot of fun with it.”
The winning department, the Outside Sales Group, raised 3,719 pounds of food alone, King said. Their reward was a pizza lunch for the entire department.
Wanting to give back to a community they care about is the main reason for participating in the fund-raiser, but there are positive side effects for the company on a whole as well, King said.
“The morale is much higher. The employees feel like they’ve really done something special,” King said. “It makes them feel so good and then they come to work and share that attitude with everybody, which is wonderful for everybody that works here.”
When the distribution team dropped off the donations, which completely packed two 28-foot Bobtail trucks, the KSBW cameras were waiting to film the fruits of the company’s labor, Bailey said.
“They actually stopped the broadcast,” he said. “They were going to shoot it over to Santa Cruz and the guys in Monterey said, ‘Stop, wait a minute,’ and then they got on the cameras and (were bowing down) and saying we’re not worthy.”
Out of about 11,000 pounds of donations generated throughout the community, Milgard raised 9,400 pounds of that, King said.
The feeling of working for a company where the employees truly care about one another makes it wonderful to go to work every day, she said.
“It’s great working for a company that wants to do so much for the people in the community because we all live here,” she said. “We all benefit from this kind of stuff.”
