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Click on photo to see just some of the food HealthNet collected for Harvest House!
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The walls are under construction! Click here for story & pictures. |
Harvest House Project Featured in Tele-Media Video
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Banks served as collection points for food donations
Valley United Way and it’s Corporate Volunteer Council's (CVC) 11th Annual Week of Caring was an incredible success! This year's ambitious and unique project was the building of "Harvest House – a Labor of Love to Feed Our Valley." Harvest House was a full-size house constructed of 100,000 cans that was built in one day on the Riverwalk in Shelton. It was dismantled immediately following Valley United Way's annual Campaign Kickoff Breakfast on September 19.- its walls of food donated to Valley agencies that provide food to the people they serve. The list of organizations that will receive the food include Spooner House, The Umbrella, YMCA, The Salvation Army, The Red Cross, the St. Vincent DePaul Society and the Parent-Child Resource Center.
"This was an incredible opportunity to do something really tremendous in the Valley," said Patricia Tarasovic, Director of the United Way’s Volunteer Action Center (of which the CVC is a part). "Not only did hundreds of volunteers from over 50 Valley companies get involved in this effort, but many others from the Valley community at large – schools, businesses, church groups, individuals – ihelped collect the food needed to build this house. This was not just a United Way project – it was a very special community project that we were pleased that so many joined."
The Corporate Volunteer Council (CVC) was created through a grant awarded to the Volunteer Action Center by the Katharine Matthies foundation. The CVC is a coalition of businesses that meets monthly to exchange information about corporate volunteer programs and assess the needs of the community. Once community needs are identified, the CVC develops fresh ideas to address and meet them, selecting one particular area of need to address during its annual Week of Caring.
To help facilitate the building of Harvest House, staff from Fletcher-Thompson, an award-winning architectural firm located in Shelton, CT, oversaw the design and construction through the house’s various stages. Over a period of several months while can donations came in, individual walls for the home were prefabricated and transported to the River Walk in Shelton on Saturday, September 17th, where the final stages of construction took place culminating in a huge celebratory block party. On Sunday, September 18th, a very special "House Warming" took place at the site, and the Valley public visited the house and donated gifts of linens, dishes, etc. to complete the new home. The additional "housewarming" gifts were donated to Spooner House.
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