UNITED WAY DAY OF CARING A SUCCESS

Community comes together to donate school supplies

“Once again, when times get tough, Lake County comes out to help,” said United Way of Lake County CEO Jennifer McCarty.

United Way’s annual Day of Caring event, held on July 22, may have looked a bit different than usual this year, but community members, organizations and businesses still showed up with trunks and bags full of school supply donations to benefit area youth in need as they prepare to head back to school.

Donations consisted of wellneeded pencils, crayons, notebooks and backpacks among other basic supplies.

There were four drop-off locations: United Way’s main office in Mentor, The Salvation Army office in Painesville, Classic Park in Eastlake and Willow Praise Church in Willowick.

McCarty explained that this year’s donation drive still followed pandemic precautions, as they adopted a drive-by format so participants only needed to drop off their donations, and there would not be

too many people gathered in one place.

“Normally our Day of Caring is a little bit different,” she said. “Pre-pandemic, what we would do is we would work with all of the non-profits in Lake County and find out what they need — anything from painting inside a room, or yard work, or building a playground one year, and then we get volunteers from our local companies and we dispatch everybody to go work on projects.”

However, when United Way was approached this year by the local branch of The Salvation Army to see if they could help gather needed school supplies for their Back to School Supply Bash, McCarty said they decided they would focus the Day of Caring on helping kids be prepared to return to school.

“We decided to combine our efforts and have people drop off school supplies,” McCarty said. “So we adopted the Back to School Bash for our Day of Caring.”

Many local organizations took the initiative to gather donations from their employees who wanted to get involved. Christine Margalis, of the Lake County General Health District, brought in the collective donations from district employees.

“We dropped off a little bit of everything, we dropped off pens and highlighters, anything that our employees were able to collect,” Margalis said. “The community has helped us out quite a bit over the last year and so we are trying to give back where we can.”

Bernadette Armbruster, representing Olon Ricerca Bioscience of Concord, also agreed that her company’s employees were also happy to get involved and give back whenever possible, in ways both big and small.

“I think we’re just happy to lend a hand into our communities any which way we can,” Armbruster said.

PHOTOS BY SHEENA HOLLAND DOLAN — THE NEWS-HERALD Bernadette Armbruster, representing Olon Ricerca Bioscience of Concord, unloads school supplies donated from her company’s employees to United Way. All donations will be going toward Salvation Army’s Back to School Supply Bash.

Rhonda Carter, left, and Michelle Graf, both United Way volunteers, sort through donations at the Day of Caring school supply drive.