FCi Federal donates Thanksgiving meals to 45 families

Employees at FCi Federal, which is more commonly known as the Kentucky Consular Center, delivered Thanksgiving meal bags to three schools Monday morning. From left, Williamsburg Youth Service Center workers Tammy Stephens and Kari-Anne Hamblin, and FCi Federal employees Clettie McKee, Justin Davenport and Tammy Ball.

45 low-income families will be having a better Thanksgiving this year thanks to a donation by employees at a local business.

FCi Federal, which is more commonly known as the Kentucky Consular Center, delivered 15 bags of food to Williamsburg Independent School, Boston Elementary School and Pleasant View Elementary School Monday morning. Each bag contains food items to make a Thanksgiving Day meal.

“We call it the FCi Shares and Cares Program,” said Tammy Ball, a supervisor with FCi Federal.

The program started last year when FCi Federal took over operation of the Kentucky Consular Center.

“We decided that we wanted to give back to the community,” Ball noted.

Last year, FCi Federal donated a total of 30 food bags to two local schools, and this year, FCi Federal employees increased the donation to 45 food bags at three local schools.

In addition to increasing the number of families helped this year, Ball said that FCi Federal employees were also able to increase the number of food items in the bags for each family.

This year’s donation includes about 1,035 pounds of food or 1,513 donated food, and 233.4 pounds of left over food that will be donated to a local food bank or ministry.

The project was a team effort by all 275 local employees.

“It had a slow start this year. Once we gathered the managers and pushed team participation then it just skyrocketed. It went above my expectations,” Ball added.

Ball said the three schools were selected because each has a large number of low-income families in need.

Ball said that next year, the company would probably try to increase the effort to 60 bags of food going to local families.

Tammy Stephens, family resource/youth service center coordinator at Williamsburg, noted that while the donation was to 15 families in Williamsburg the gift would actually help a total of 40 children just in Williamsburg.

“A lot of the people we looked at are people, who are food insecure typically. They are either already on our backpack program where we send home food for the weekend or they have just had some recent transitions in their home situation,” Stephens said. “Some have been moved from one home to a more stable home and they just need a little bit more help right now to get established.”

Stephens said that the gift is badly needed and she is glad to hear that FCi Federal is considering expanding the program next year.

“Every year the need gets greater,” Stephens added.