Letters to Santa 2019

Santa, The Grinch and the Impact team make their annual stop to Pickard Elementary School for the annual Letters to Santa event. This yearly community event gives Impact the chance to give back with special gifts for elementary students.

Video Transcript 

We’re at Pickard Elementary School, working with the students for letters to Santa. Impact came out and brought presents for all of our students. The event is we have students from grades pre-K through fourth grade write letters to Santa. They send these in and Frank Cucco’s wife Heidi shops personally for each student. Students in pre-K through fourth grade, I’ll receive Christmas gifts. 

We have a partnership with Impact—Impact has been partnered with Pickard for over 12 years now, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful partnership that we’ve had. We’re really grateful. Everybody appreciated that planets, the students, teachers that they think like we do now. This is a great partnership. We love being part of our community that we work in, that we are engaged in back about 12 years ago. There’s a limited number of gifts here. At that point in time, Franco decided that we’re going to sponsor the whole school, so 12 years later, we’re still here.

Everyone and anyone really can be involved. We have employees contribute, we have donations received from even some partners of impact. We have great relationships with many people that support this event. We’ve got some new guests in the upcoming years that have helped join to make this more fun for the students. But really, it’s up to the employees. It’s really driven by our employees and we appreciate every single person that puts any effort or donation or contribution towards this event for us by being involved, being a part of the community, that helps us be a better organization, be a better company and be better people. 

Now, that it’s become such a big part of the school culture that it really starts. It really goes on the whole year through students they’re talking about. We’re talking about generations now, so we’ve got students who have graduated from high school that have enjoyed Santa. So they have talked about this with their families and their little brothers and sisters. We saw people. They’re really excited about it. I’m very, really happy about the press and excitement. They don’t receive gifts like this one home from others, so this is a great opportunity for them to to make their life a little bit better. My favorite part of this event each year is seeing all the students just react when they won secret Santa. And now they get to see the Grinch, the smiles and the laughter of the students receiving the gifts and them being so very humble when they received it, having the opportunity to see the kids receiving and how we’re supposed to be grateful at the same time, learn from the experience to be able to take and give being actually present in their lives where they could have something tangible to take back with them. 

I love how excited they get for their classmates as well. It just really brings joy to everybody that’s here. Some would say thank you, some were so embarrassed that they couldn’t say anything but just them to receive something and feeling good about themselves and feeling happy. You know, we’re, of course, here for academic growth and achievement, but it takes making the students want to come. So, this partnership with Impact is one way that we can make students feel good about coming to school. My thanks go out to the owners of the company, Frank and Heidi, for establishing this wonderful, wonderful partnership with Pickard.