READING, Pa.- Another year, a new goal and a lot of giving back. That’s what the United Way of Berks County celebrated Wednesday morning while kicking off its campaign.<\/p>\n
“It’s campaign season, so we’re trying to raise money for the great cause that United Way helps,” says Brad Stephenson.<\/p>\n
“33 agencies plus other things; let’s just try to make an impact in the community,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
New Castle Landscaping owner Brad Stephenson and his wife are campaign co-chairs this year. He says the opportunity aligned with their mission to impact 100,000 lives.<\/p>\n
“Community is great, and we’ve got to give where we live,” he says.<\/p>\n
It’s also United Way’s Day of Caring, which helps the non-profit and organizations they serve in a different way.<\/p>\n
“We reach out to the non-profit community and ask if there is something that a group of volunteers could help with,” says Tammy White, President of the United Way of Berks County.<\/p>\n
Around 500 volunteers worked on a number of projects at various locations.<\/p>\n
“Non-profits rely heavily on volunteers to do work like this because we just don’t have the capacity and the resources to do so,” says Alyssa Bushkie, CEO of the Opportunity House.<\/p>\n
Opportunity House had volunteers working on a number of projects, including painting, cleaning buses, and preparing and serving lunch at the shelter.<\/p>\n
“It is people giving at all levels, and then when you bring all those gifts together, it will amount to a huge gift, and it will be put to work in our community helping over 190,000 people,” says White.<\/p>\n
United Way’s financial goal this year is 10.5 million dollars.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to exceed it,” says Stephenson. “That’s our goal.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa.- Another year, a new goal and a lot of giving back. That’s what the United Way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":["post-287709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}