Back to School Supplies and Annual Holiday
Drive.
Many Neighborhood Projects,
Carefully Selected
At the Annual Holiday Drive every year in
November and December, employees
donate gifts and money for neighborhood
families. Residents of the Baden district
where ELANTAS PDG is located often have
very low incomes, and some have no
income at all. The ELANTAS PDG employees
helped five families in St. Louis in
2019, making it possible for them to receive
gifts such as shoes, toys, clothing,
and sometimes even a basket of food under
their Christmas tree. For more than
25 years, ELANTAS employees have helped
put a smile on the faces of families at
Christmas – sometimes very practically, dis-
guised as Santa Claus.
With the second major initiative, Back to
School Supplies, needy children from the
neighborhood have been receiving support
for more than ten years. Money collected
by the employees is used to buy
school supplies such as exercise books and
pens and to provide about 25 schoolchil-
dren with these items every year as a basis
for their education. “It’s wonderful to
see the children’s sparkling eyes when they
receive the school supplies. That’s our
motivation,“ says Francine Jamison, who
coordinates this aid project at ELANTAS
PDG.
Given the many requests for support,
Francine Jamison and her colleagues
are the first to gather information about
the proposed projects. Then, based on
their research, the management decides
in the fall which initiatives will be supported
in the following year in keeping
with the motto “helping people to help
Looking to the Future 45
themselves.” The Back to School Supplies
and Annual Holiday Drive projects are
always included. And will be again in
2020.
The numerous awards ELANTAS
PDG has received as a top employer show
that the climate of support reflects back
on the company. Since 2013, the company
has been on the St. Louis Post Dispatch
newspaper’s Top Workplaces list five times.
In this respect, too, the employees have
been demonstrating exceptionally high
personal commitment for years: The
evaluation is based exclusively on an employee
survey. More than 80 percent of
the workforce is regularly involved in this
process.
For more than 25 years, ELANTAS employees have been helping to put smiles on
families’ faces.
With the money collected, school supplies like exercise books and pens are bought
and provided to around 25 schoolchildren each year.