By Jessica Tonyan, Project Engineer with Nexus 5 Group
Every year around the holiday season, Nexus 5 Group encourages all of our employees to give back to the community. It has became our ‘tradition’ over the last few years, you might say.
For the second year, we decided to partner with Operation Breakthrough by ‘adopting’ a family and volunteering to help set up for their holiday store. Helping children in need seems to be something that really motivates several of us here at Nexus 5 Group. We all were ready to roll-up our sleeves and get to work.
First task: Raise money for our family.
This year we were assigned a family that consisted of a single mother and her three young girls. We asked for donations from our team members and boy did they come through! Our team donated $1,010 total and Nexus 5 Group matches that amount- for a total of $2,020 to be donated to our family! With money in hand we went shopping and we purchased everything on the family's list plus some extra items. After everything was purchased, we still had several hundred dollars left over. So we purchased items for the holiday store.
Second task: Office volunteer day!
We give everyone in the office the opportunity to sign up for a shift to help at the Operation Breakthrough Christmas Warehouse. During this time, we help organize, sort and get everything ready for the 1,000+ families to come get their donations or shop in the holiday store. The amount of generosity in our community is amazing to watch during this time... it's a humbling experience.
To get involved with Operation Breakthrough, please visit their website!
Community Impact is one of our core values at Nexus 5 and we are very proud of how our team comes together each year to give back to our community. It’s definitely a tradition that isn’t going away anytime soon! #SERVEWELL
More information about Operation Breakthrough
Operation Breakthrough is a childcare center that serves over 650 children from ages 6 weeks to 14 years old. They not only provide childcare, but the families are provided a variety of programs designed to promote healthy family relationships. A few of the programs include early childhood education, before and after school care, occupational and physical therapy provided on-site, dental clinics, health care clinics, speech and language therapy provided on-site, family nurturing programs to help parents, emergency aid, on-site food and clothing pantry, WIC classes available on-site and adult therapy.
The families that receive these services all live below the federal poverty level. In fact, eighty percent of the families live on less than $12,000 annually. One out of five children they serve is homeless, living in battered women’s or homeless shelters or transitional living, and sixty five percent of those children have experienced trauma or witnessed incidents of violence by age five.
Every holiday season Operation Breakthrough does a Christmas program and helps provide toys and household items to families in need through two programs, Adopt-A-Family and the Holiday Store. This year over 900 families were “adopted” by other families or businesses in the Kansas City area with their Adopt-A-Family program. Their Holiday Store served an additional 800 families.