The Salvation Army Receives Help from PolyOne Glasforms
Jon Hughston, of PolyOne Glasforms makes a delivery.
PolyOne Glasforms of Birmingham is a United Way of Central Alabama partner, and has been serving with The Salvation Army of Greater Birmingham for the past year. PolyOne Glasforms is located in Pinson and has approximately 200 employees. Teams of volunteers from the company have helped us prepare well-balanced food bags for our food pantry. “PolyOne is a proud United Way Partner and we chose to serve at The Salvation Army because it is a United Way agency and because it’s easy for our company to volunteer here as a group,” says Jon Hughston, Senior Production Supervisor at PolyOne Glasforms.
The Salvation Army serves three meals a day to shelter clients, with lunch open to anyone needing a warm meal. Twice weekly, food bags are distributed to individuals and families in need of food assistance through our food pantry. Each week, our staff along with help from volunteers, prepares, serves, and distributes large amounts of food. Last month, while the PolyOne volunteer team was assembling food bags they ran out of dry food items for the bags. At that moment, they decided to take the matter into their own hands and host a food drive to help fill up the pantry. Almost immediately, PolyOne held a month long company-wide food drive to collect dry food items for The Salvation Army’s food pantry. In order to encourage donations from employees, they made it fun and created a competition for donations with the winner receiving a pizza party in recognition of the most donations. As a company, they collected over 1,600 dry food items, pre-assembled 30 food bags for distribution, and donated large bulk items like rice and peanut butter that will be used in our kitchen.
Pre-assembled food bags are delivered to the food pantry.
“We are thankful for the support of local businesses like PolyOne Glasforms. We are especially appreciative of companies that are willing to volunteer their time and talents to serve alongside us. We depend on donations from the community in order to help the most people and we look forward to sharing these food donations they collected with families in need,” says Major Bob Parker, Area Commander of The Salvation Army of Greater Birmingham. Last year, The Salvation Army provided more than 170,000 meals to those in need in Birmingham. If you are interested in helping The Salvation Army by volunteering your time or hosting a food drive to support our food pantry, please contact Elaine Anderson at Elaine.Anderson@uss.salvationarmy.org or 205.328.0743.
