The team at Powell Contracting is a competitive one. They like to challenge each other and spur each other on – and this competitive streak has paid dividends for Aurora's Welcoming Arms.

Last week, the Whitchurch-Stouffville-based business presented Welcoming Arms volunteers with a cheque for $10,000.

The money will be used by the ecumenical organization to support their weekly meal programs – Welcome Table and Martha's Table – as well as their Bridging the Gap program, which provides assistance to Aurora's most vulnerable residents.

“We had the resources and energy to do something internally here at Powell Contracting, but we didn't know where to focus our energy,” says Phil Breault, Sustainability Manager at Powell. “We reached out to Mayor Tom Mrakas and, through some guidance, he pointed us in a couple of directions. After doing some research, we fell onto Welcoming Arms as the charity we wanted to help.

“We have a fairly large office with a lot of employees and some of them are actually fairly familiar with the program, and it has either helped them through somebody they knew or somebody closer. Just the fact it was a very rooted program that has been helping people in need for a while now really resonated with us and that is why we chose them.”

The team set out on a four-week fundraiser. Through games, activities and challenging each other, they were able to raise $5,000, with a further matching donation from Powell itself.

“We have a pretty competitive nature just in the staff that we have,” explains Breault. “We ran tallies week over week and kind of had a game to see who was in the lead, then we challenged each division to try to beat one another. It was a friendly competition that played to our competitive sides.”

This commitment only intensified as they learned more about the work Welcoming Arms does.

At the outset, Breault says they were focused on helping get at least one of their three core programs back up and running. As a result of COVID-19, they had to scale back their operations and the Powell team wanted to help them get back up to speed.

“Our objective was to bring at least one back, but in an ideal world all of those programs would be back online,” he says. “Speaking for myself, I was very excited and motivated to generate as much as possible. As the numbers came in, we were extremely excited. We shared updates in our weekly newsletter to staff, kept them engaged and focused, building on that sense of competition – but also the sense of pride by helping such a strong community program. It was awesome to see week over week the numbers keep going up and the entire staff is very proud.”

And they were very proud to welcome the Welcoming Arms team to their business last Monday to hand over the funds.

“I want to thank all of the staff who participated – we took this to heart,” says Breault. “We're very proud of everything that we have done and being able to help out Welcoming Arms. We would like to thank them because they have been great to work with and we'd also like to thank the Mayor and Councillor Sandra Humfryes who joined us and is a proponent of Welcoming Arms.

“Everybody is sitting back a little bit in these pretty uncertain times, but if I had anything to suggest [for other companies to challenge their employees in supporting a community group at this time], it would be: just try it. I think a huge hurdle is actually taking the first step in doing something.

“We have similar challenges in our organization, a lot of people have opinions, but there is a difference between an opinion and an idea. Craft an idea. Most of the ideas we're working from are employee-led or suggested, so we have a very easy one-page template to get an idea going, then we vet that through our committee of about four individuals. My suggestion is simply to just do it, try it; stop talking about it and actually put some pen to paper.”

By Brock Weir