OCTOBER    2 0 2 3

HEB -Helping Here, at Santa Maria

On Tuesday September 20, Santa Maria welcomed HEB to our Bonita House Campus.  The day started bright and early with more than 50 HEB employees full of energy and excited to get to work making improvements to our facility. We loved working with this amazing team to accomplish an immense number of projects all in one day.   

Projects included spending time with our youngest participants in childcare, building desks for a new after school computer lab, building storage cabinets for an outdoor space, creating an engaging family wellness space for moms and kids, hanging beautiful artistic photographs in various rooms decorating our campus, installing acoustic panels to help with the echoing sound in our large dining room, as well as many more facilities updates.

They also conducted a workshop, training one-on-one with our participants teaching job readiness and interviewing skills. Last, but not least and a very big surprise, an HEB truck containing 10 pallets of much needed baby items for Santa Maria’s youngest participants was delivered to our door!  We are still experiencing a cascade of positive emotions derived from HEB’s visit.

We are filled with gratitude and appreciation for the large investment HEB has made to our Santa Maria facilities via both volunteer time and talents and donating funds for much needed professional contractor work as well.  The positive feedback from participants is overwhelming.  In addition, the joy overflowing from these updated spaces is immense with stronger bonds being formed among participants and between mothers and their children. 

Watch this video to get a sense of this amazing day with

our HEB partners!

Caterpillar Day of Caring

On Thursday September 7, we hosted our first group of volunteers from Caterpillar at Bonita House for a Day of Caring organized through our partnership with United Way of Greater Houston. This group of volunteers spent the morning making repairs to our laundry room. We loved to see this project come to fruition since this is a heavy traffic area that our participants use on a regular basis and needed lots of love.

Santa Maria hosted the second group of volunteers from Caterpillar on Wednesday, October 4 working to organize the storage room in the Recovery Advocates Station, assembling storage units, painting as well as providing and installing a brand-new fridge!

Our sincere gratitude to these great groups of volunteers from Caterpillar for their time, financial support, and ideas to freshen up our facilities.

The mission of Santa Maria is to empower women and their families to lead healthy, successful, productive and self-fulfilling lives. 

www.santamariahostel.org

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