“I think if you just walked around the mall and said, ‘hey, I need you to buy a coat for a five year old little girl,’ 90% of the people would do it.”
Our very own Paul Zachos has a lot of ideas on how we can give back during the holiday season. Operation Christmas Coat, an initiative he started several years ago, aims to deliver coats to children in Douglas County as the weather gets colder. Many of these children are residents of Youth Villages, another nonprofit we’ve talked about before.
“I was at Youth Villages one afternoon and I was looking at these kids walking around campus. It was kind of cool outside and a lot of them just had old coats and hoodies… I said, you know what? It's 130 to 150 kids. I bet if I get out there and talk to some friends of mine I can see if I can get them all a new coat for Christmas. So that’s kind of where that started.”
As he guessed, many people in the community stepped up.
“I think everybody truly has a good heart and wants to help. They just don't know how to get it to the end user and we kind of work in reverse. We know who the end user is and we just go the other way and say, okay, I know who the end user is. I know what sizes, I know what organization they're with. I know it's all legit. Now, how do I get, you know, 250, 300, 400 coats? How do I get those to the end user?”
One person who stepped up in a huge way was Anthony Zito, Chief Construction Officer of Benning Construction. With a history of donating to nonprofits, he was quick to step up and offer to help The Zachos Team with this project.
“We try to go above and beyond,” Zito says. “We set aside an amount of our profit to donate to nonprofits and other organizations that help out around the communities…once we first heard about the coats, [I wanted to] have the company help something that's in my community.
“I've lived in Douglas County for 40 years, since I was five years old… I live in Douglas County still to this day, so anything I can do within my company and my organization to help out the communities that I live in and that I'm in is something that I like to be able to do.”
What started as a small-scale endeavor quickly grew into a more streamlined process. Operation Christmas Coat now has collection boxes at various job sites, as well as manages lists of coat sizes that are needed and already collected. Benning Construction helps greatly in this process, and it has become a joint effort between Paul and Zito to meet the needs of the community at large. They have coordinated the purchase and distribution of thousands of coats over the past several years.
“I know that those kids over there struggle,” Paul says. “I know that they come from not the best situations so any little thing that we can do to help them out, to make their life a little bit easier, is I think a great thing to be able to do with them.
“You hate to ask a kid, what do you want for Christmas? And their answer is a coat. You're expecting an answer to be a truck or a baby doll or a bike or something like that. And when a kid asks for a coat, it shows you that they're just looking for a necessity, not a nicety, I guess. But I think it's a big problem. I think people are struggling out there financially. So if you buy one coat for one kid, that one kid, it's made a difference in their life. And then obviously, if you can do multiple, the more, the better. We can't help them all. But we need to try to if we can.”
This year, Paul and Zito are also helping the Douglas County School System deliver 12 Nintendo Switches to students who have been chosen by their teachers. It’s a reminder for the students to always put their best foot forward, as Zito says.
“It's knowing that no matter what's going on in their life, that there's people out there that are looking and noticing them.”
If you’d like to share the Christmas spirit with the youth of Douglas County this holiday season, reach out to The Zachos Team today and find out how you can help.
Written by Paul Zachos