Barbershop conducting food drive
TROY, N.Y. » Downtown barbershop Troy Grooming Co. is carrying on a longtime tradition of helping neighbors during the holiday season with its annual food drive.
Troy Grooming Co., located at 205 River St., is hosting its third annual food drive to benefit Unity House, a Collar City-based human service agency that provides a wide range of services to local families and individuals in need.
From now until Dec. 31, customers and noncustomers are encouraged to bring a nonperishable food items to the barbershop, and they will be donated to Unity House.
Any customer who brings in an item will receive $2 off the price of a haircut at the barbershop through Christmas Eve.
Business owner Jamie Magur is planning to bringing a food donation to Unity House ahead of Thanksgiving, and then again before Christmas, with donations still accepted through the end of the year for a final donation.
Unity House, along with its year-round food pantry and a community meal on Thanksgiving Day, typically provides food packages to more than 400 families within the region for Thanksgiving.
From Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, Troy Grooming Co. is pledging to donate $1 from any service purchased at the barbershop, and donate that money to Unity House after the holidays.
Magur started the drive in 2015, during the barbershop’s first holiday season, but giving to others around the holidays is a longtime family tradition for Magur.
When he was a kid, Magur’s grandmother — Connie Ligato — owned Connie’s Coffee Break, a luncheonette on Fulton Street that was open from the 1960s to early 1990s.
Each Thanksgiving and Easter, the eatery would open and serve food to Joseph’s House and Bethany Center beneficiaries.
Magur recalls helping with these meals throughout his childhood.
“I remember doing it and I remember how much credit and praise she was given, and the pleasure that she got from doing it. She wasn’t doing it for the acknowledgement,” he said. “My grandmother and her children did it because they felt it was what you were supposed to do as part of the community.”
Now that Magur has the opportunity to do something similar at Troy Grooming Co., he’s continuing the tradition. “It’s just something that needs to be carried on,” Magur said. “It upsets me the amount of poverty that we have here, and little things like this, if used in the right way, can go a long way during this time of the year.”
In addition to its holiday drive and donation, Troy Grooming Co. also recently started a new tradition, which will be a continuous year-round effort. Whenever one of the barbers or staff members curses or does anything inappropriate in the presence of a child or woman, they must put a donation of a dollar or more into a designated jar at the shop. The first month that the jar was established, the cash collected went to local nonprofit Team HERO, and then the next month it went to Troy’s School 18 to help students in need pay for their end-of-year field trip to Boston. In the future, Magur’s plan is to alternate between these two causes each month.
“The main focus is we’re trying to help out,” Magur said, noting that donations as little as one dollar can make a big difference.