Week of Caring Reaps Major Benefits for Valley

’s Corporate Volunteer Council (CVC) completed its 16th annual Week of Caring project over the weekend building a 400-square-foot house whose walls were composed of nonperishable food items for area food banks. The project was an enormous success resulting in thousands of meals that will feed Valley Families in need!

Pitney Bowes was the “Marquis Sponsor” for Harvest House IV. Also underwriting the event were the following Corporate Sponsors: Platinum-PerkinElmer; Gold - and First Niagara and ; Silver -Iroquois Gas Transmission, HealthNet and Valley Community Foundation. These companies and more than 50 other Valley businesses on the CVC and in the Valley ran food drives at their facilities and provided hundreds of volunteers to help with the build.

Student teams from Emmett O’Brien Vocational Technical School’s Computer Aided Drafting and Design (CADD) and Carpentry Departments began by developing blueprints of a 20x20 square-foot house under the supervision of Matthew Holst, a structural engineer from Fletcher-Thompson, a Shelton-based architecture firm. The Valley United Way’s Harvest House program has been so successful that the Emmett O’Brien School adopted this specific blueprint planning and design as part of their curriculum. Mr. Charles Haynes was the CADD Design Teacher and Mr. Chris Sansone and Rit Lewis were the Carpentry Teachers.

Harvest House was assembled on the Shelton Riverwalk by the students from O’Brien, and people from all over the Valley came to the Shelton Riverwalk all weekend long to bring food and help with the build. Some of the Volunteers were from the United Way Youth Leadership program, the Valley United Way High School Volunteer Council, Ansonia Prendergast School, , , Ansonia Middle and Derby Middle Schools.

On Monday, area food banks and their volunteers picked up the large quantity of food and transported it back to their individual agencies where it is being put to good use in helping those in need. Groups that participated include Spooner House, the Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul Society, Birmingham Group and the Parent Child Resource Center.