Cornwall Ontario — Home Depot staff, with the help of Baxtrom’s Your Independent Grocer, have rallied together to warm the hearts and tummies of local children this Christmas. The Home Depot Management Team and Social Committee raised $1000 to ensure that 25 families of children on the Big Brothers Big Sisters waitlist received a holiday meal.

“Every year, we’ve done small things to help those in need around the holidays,” said Home Depot Cornwall Manager Don St. Denis. “This year we wanted to go even bigger, so we teamed up with Big Brothers Big Sisters…to help as many families as we could.”

Home Depot staff raised the money to buy turkeys through a 50/50 draw and individual staff donations.

Families involved in the initiative will each receive a full turkey dinner with all of the fixings from Baxtrom’s Your Independent Grocer. Baxtrom’s  has generously donated other food items such as stuffing, potatoes, gravy, buns and butter.

The meals will serve a total of 42 local children and their families.

“This is something new for us and we really appreciate Home Depot and Baxtrom’s doing this for our families,” said BBBS Executive Director Amanda Brisson.

“This is really going above and beyond for our kids.”

When Home Depot head office found out about the local store’s community effort, they stepped in to donate $1000 worth of toys so that the BBBS waitlist children would be guaranteed to have a toy under the tree. Home depot staff will be joining Big Brothers Big Sisters of Cornwall and District staff to hand out the dinners to the families on December 22nd.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Cornwall and District serves a total of 406 children and youth in the Cornwall area, providing free One-on-One Mentoring programs to children and youth in need of a positive role model. There are currently 117 children on the waitlist, who are waiting to be “matched” with a responsible adult mentor volunteer.

For more information about Big Brothers Big Sisters of Cornwall and District and how you can help, visit www.bigbrothersbigsisters.ca/cornwall.