In the Community

From 2018 - 2019, during the last few years that we were able to put up our home Christmas light display, we decided to start taking on a charity project each year that we felt could make a real difference in someone's life in our local community.

Your voluntary donations in past years at our Christmas home display have gone towards these projects.

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Our 2020 Project: Helping a Community Health Outreach Center Work Safely through COVID-19

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For our 2020 charity project, we chose to put our lighting and construction skills to good use to help a local mental health organization protect its amazing staff from COVID-19.

Places for People, a certified community behavioral health organization located right here in St. Louis, has been providing assistance, support, and health care services to those struggling with mental health and substance abuse disorders since 1973.  They work tirelessly to help over 2,000 people a year along the road to recovery, and when COVID-19 came and they continued to assist those in need despite the risks, we wanted to do something to help them.

This year, we used the funds from our 2019 holiday lighting display donations, along with additional funds from our company, to build a COVID-19 sterilization cabinet that we donated to Places for People.  Our full-size sterilization cabinet has a hanging rack that can accommodate many masks, as well as plenty of extra room for lab coats, medical gowns, and other clothing items.  We installed 12 UV-C light bulbs in 6 different light fixtures, at different angles, so as to ensure full light coverage of the items placed in the cabinet.  Within just a few minutes of exposure to the UV-C light, all traces of the COVID-19 virus (as well as most other viruses) are killed and the contents of the cabinet are sterilized.

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Our 2019 Project: Helping Out a Local Mom whose Compassion Blew Us Away

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During the 2018 Christmas season, we met a local mom whose compassion for children in need blew us away.  In chatting with her, we discovered that she is currently caring for five special needs children and a baby at home, all of whom she adopted, and was doing this on her own, as an incredibly dedicated single mom.  We also realized that some home repair and modification projects that we knew we had the skills to do could make a transformational difference in her family's daily lives.

So, over that next Spring and Summer, we tackled a variety of home improvement projects for her for no charge, using the funds from the 2018 holiday lighting home display donations to pay for part of the materials, donating our labor for free, and adding additional funds from our company to cover the remaining material costs.

Here are a few of the home improvement projects we were able to do for her:

  • Repaired the broken mechanism on her garage door so that she could once again use her garage to get the family ready to go out instead of having to secure multiple children into car seats in the rain and snow
  • Installed lots of new shelving along the sides of her garage so that she would have an organized environment with plenty of space
  • Found, purchased, custom-modified, and installed a specialty bathtub on the main floor of her home so that she could securely bathe her quadriplegic daughter on her own
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