Local realtors took a day away from their office last week to give back to the community.
Staff from the Windsor offices of Keller Williams Realty and their families spent Thursday at the headquarters of the Windsor Home Coalition, helping them build a new Kids First Food Bank. The effort was part of the realty's RED Day, where employees are encouraged to spend the day giving back to their community.
Over 50 employees took part in the project, which involved a reconfiguration of the food back at the building on Howard Avenue.
Meg Hetherington, the team leader and CEO for Keller Williams Realty in London and Windsor, said employees were not to perform any work-related tasks until after 5 p.m. that day, and instead use that energy to help their neighbours.
"RED Day means Renew, Energize and Donate," said Hetherington. "We feel that it's super important to be able to give back to organizations that otherwise would maybe not have this help. We work in this community and it's important for us to give back as much as we can."
The food bank project is in partnership with Second Harvest, according to Angela Yakonich, the executive director of Windsor Family Homes and Community Partnership.
"They've given us the platform to rescue food from restaurants, grocery stores and agricultural centres so that we can always have fresh food on sight as well," said Yakonich.
The Kids First Food Bank bounced back from closure last year due to a lack of food, thanks to overwhelming support from the community. Yakonich said the objective with the realtors was to make their food bank more "dignified", rather than "you get what you get".
"We had the idea, we looked at the space we had, and we decided to build the wall in the back, so we will now have two grocery store aisles," said Yakonich.
Second Harvest, the largest food bank supporter in Canada, also provides support to other local food banks as well as school breakfast programs. The Kids First Food Bank serves about 900 people per week.
