2018 Day of Smiles: Growing Smiles

It’s not a secret that we love giving back to our communities. On April 11th, we held our Third Annual Day of Smiles, an event that gathered over 150 of our team members to volunteer at 12 different community service projects throughout the city.

As a company, we invest at least 5% of our pre-tax earnings to support nonprofit organizations – and though we support a wide variety of causes, we focus our efforts on three areas:  Sharing Smiles, Growing Smiles, and Hero Smiles. Click here to read more about each.

On Day of Smiles, 3 of our service projects centered around the theme of “Growing Smiles” and providing access to healthy food and education about food choices. Read on to learn more about these great projects!

412 Food Rescue

A few of our volunteers spent the day with 412 Food Rescue, an organization that aims to prevent perfectly good food from entering the waste stream. Our volunteers helped to prepare supplies for their Hidden Harvest program, which gleans fruit and vegetables from public and privately-owned trees, orchards, farms, and gardens to provide fresh food options for nonprofits and the people they serve!

Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank

One group of volunteers headed to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in Duquesne to help repack food for those in need. The Food Bank distributes 2.2 million pounds of groceries a month – a feat that could never be accomplished without the hard work of volunteers!

Grow Pittsburgh – Braddock Farms

Another group went to volunteer at Grow Pittsburgh’s Braddock Farms location. Braddock is a food desert and this farm is the community’s single source of fresh produce during the growing season. By the end of the day, our team was weeding and planting experts!

Check out our other blogs in this series to learn about our community projects for Sharing Smiles and Hero Smiles.