A Benevolence Event Highlight
Children often come into foster care with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Forgotten Initiative is a local ministry supporting the local foster care community that places many of these children. Journey Bags are bags filled with personal and comfort items for foster children to call their own, and one of TFI’s goals is to place a journey bag into the hands of each child they place with a family.
We wanted to support this effort by hosting a Journey Bag Packing event here at Nussbaum. The goal in giving a child a Journey Bag is to bless each child and let them know that they are loved, prayed for, and remembered! Our goal at Nussbaum was to donate 70 Journey Bags to TFI.
In the past, we’ve hosted Tender Mercies events with Midwest Food Bank (you can read more about that here), but the Journey Bags initiative was a whole new ballpark for us on the Benevolence Committee. First, we want to give a huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated in this event and rolled with us when our plans shifted as the day progressed!
Since many specific items are needed for each bag, we wanted to make it as easy on everyone as possible, so we split the event into two days. The first day, our goal was to pack all “toiletry” items, so that the next day (the official “bag packing day”) would go as smoothly as possible. Well, Nussbaum employees blew those expectations out of the water!
The very first group packed all 70 toiletry bags within the first 8 minutes of their time slot. WOW! We regrouped and had the next group help set up for the first round of bags and ended up beginning the Journey Bag packing on day 1 instead of day 2 like we had originally planned. The rest of the event flew by, and bags were packed efficiently and carefully. We loved watching you all come and take such care with the items as you packaged them. We appreciate the flexibility and your willingness to help. TFI is so appreciative of all we did.
From Jamie, our contact at TFI: “This is amazing! We are so thankful to the Nussbaum crew! So very thankful for your partnership!”
These bags will be a huge blessing to both the foster parents and the children themselves. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you for giving up your time to make someone’s day a little brighter. We truly appreciate you all and look forward to hosting more events like this in the future. We welcome any feedback you may have about the event and, again, are so grateful to everyone who participated.
Chris A., Noah, Lisa, Maya, and Jessi (The Nussbaum Benevolence Committee)
PS – You can learn more about The Forgotten Initiative on their website, which we will link here.
About The Benevolence Committee
The Benevolence Committee exists to amplify and uphold our “Benevolence” core value and serve as a bridge between employee-owners and the charities we regularly support. Packing Journey Bags for The Forgotten Initiative is one such initiative. Look for upcoming events on the Dashboard and contact the committee with any questions or comments via benevolencecommittee@nussbaum.com.
