PSEG Long Island teams up with Salvation Army for gift drive
(Photo courtesy of PSEG)
The holiday season tends to weigh heaviest on low-income families, given that concerns regarding food and shelter are compounded by potentially not having enough money for Christmas presents. Rather than have an enormous swath of poor children wake up disappointed at not having been visited by Santa Claus, the Salvation Army has been running what they call the Angel Tree Program, which matches donors with children from qualified families and provides Good Samaritans with a tag symbolizing the wishes and desires of a real child or youth that is in one of these programs. One of the largest corporate partners that has been teaming up with the Salvation Army for this initiative since 2005 is PSEG Long Island. Recently, the utility company used its Hicksville facility as a staging area where more than 300 employees gathered under an enormous Christmas tree to package up and load a variety of requested gifts onto a pair of panel trucks headed out to the Salvation Army’s Riverhead facility. For John O’Connell, PSEG Vice President of Transmission and Distribution, the success of this year’s program is a rightful point of pride.
“We had a bunch of our employees work together on this. They either bought individual gifts for individual children or they worked as teams. They worked at collecting the gifts on-site, purchasing the gifts themselves, and we funneled all the gifts over here to one of our main offices here in Hicksville,” he explained. “We got a nice big Christmas tree, loaded up the presents around it and that kind of started the process. It was a really great event. We had the people from the Salvation Army that joined us at the ceremony yesterday, which was nice. And it started out the process really well.”
(Photo courtesy of PSEG)
The way the program works is that the Salvation Army provided PSEG (and National Grid, who also partnered with its fellow utility) with tags bearing the names of children to be adopted as gift beneficiaries. The program serves children from newborns to 16 year olds. Once volunteers take these tags, they go shopping for these presents and then gather together to collect these unwrapped donations with tags attached before they’re shipped off to a Salvation Army distribution site, where these families can arrive to pick up the gifts the Wednesday before Christmas. Among the items that children will receive are bikes, tablets, video games, coats, toys, games, dolls, action figures, clothes and sneakers they wished for this year. This year, O’Connell said his “Santas” will be gifting approximately 151 kids through the auspices of PSEG Long Island’s involvement with the Angel Tree Program.
“Of all the things we do, it’s easy because it’s a good cause and a nice time of year. We get a lot of people that are interested and it just flows,” O’Connell said. “I remember growing up and how excited I was for Christmas. I wanted something and if you got it or anything close, you were just thrilled. I remember how excited my parents were at that time. You get a little older and you have children—I have two children—and you see the magic and their hopes and the smiles when they got what they wanted. It was really rewarding for them and for me as a parent. But to be able to continue to do that for families that need a little bit of help really does make this coming together that much more special.”
(Photo courtesy of PSEG)
O’Connell was also quick to point out that the Angel Tree Program is one of many ways PSEG Long Island involves itself with the local community.
“One of the priorities of our company is being a good neighbor and a good partner. We want to do our business, which is electric service, and we want to be a good partner and bring back to the communities. And we do that through a number of different ways,” he said. “This year we will have spent 29,000 community service hours with our employees via all kinds of charity events throughout the Island. This is just one of them. It’s another opportunity for our employees to fill that role. It’s important to us because we want to be a good neighbor. Of all the things we do, it’s just nice to be buying gifts for children this time of year. Even when you do it for your own children that don’t need it or want it as much. But to provide it for some families that are in need is just all the better.”
