Graybar Electric Co., St. Louis, recently announced that it raised more than $144,000 for charities across the United States through its community platform, Graybar CARES. Over the past month, Graybar employees, customers and manufacturers raised funds in a friendly competition to benefit various charities, including the American Cancer Society, Big Brothers Big Sisters, SouthSide Early Childhood Center in St. Louis, Ronald McDonald House, Make-A-Wish and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, among others. Graybar’s Pittsburgh District took top honors in the competition by raising more than $18,000 for its charity.
These charitable efforts served as a preview to the company’s national training conference held in Phoenix last week. At the conference, employees and manufacturers competed in various teambuilding activities to win an additional $5,000 donation from the Graybar Foundation. Graybar’s California District won the competition and plans to designate the Foundation’s charitable gift to Homes for Our Troops.
“I am very proud of the impact we continue to make in the communities where we do business,” said Graybar Chairman, President and CEO Kathleen Mazzarella. “This was the most successful of our recent Graybar CARES events thanks to the overwhelming support of our employees, manufacturers and customers.”
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.