Once again this Thanksgiving, the Watertown Police Department’s Whooley Foundation teamed with a local business to provide dozens of meals to families who would struggle to put on dinner for the holiday.
Three years ago, Steve and Alex Akian, the owners of Akian Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning, donated 10 Thanksgiving meals to help people in Watertown. This year they provided dozens of meals, and were joined by the Watertown Community Foundation Outreach, Bob Airasian, Watertown Youth Hockey, Doug Orifice/Arsenal Financial, and East Cambridge Savings Bank to provide 85 meals.
“Thanksgiving has always been an important holiday for us, and it has been a little extra special this year. It’s the first year to have Thanksgiving without our grandfather,” Steve said.
The Akians started their business seven years ago, and had been discussing how they could help out and provide meals. However, they didn’t know who could help them find people who needed them.
“Our service manager, his mother works for the Red Cross, and he was talking to her about it and she said ‘Whenever we do efforts like that we always contact the local police,” Steve said.
They linked up with Watertown Police Lt. Ken Swift, who coordinates the WPD’s Whooley Foundation.
“At that point I was running the Whooley Fund Christmas drive. We knew some families who needed it, so we reached out to those 10 families,” Swift said.
The need has grown quickly over the past few years, Swift said.
“Last year it went to over 50, now it is 85,” Swift said.
Finding the families who need help at Thanksgiving is quite an undertaking, and Swift got a lot of help from Diane Hairston, who now works for the Watertown Police and for many years worked for the Watertown Housing Authority.
“She really has done an incredible job organizing it. Between the meetings with police, Housing, schools, the City, Grace Chapel, the Watertown Boys and Girls Club, we were able to come together and identify the 85 families that need Thanksgiving meals,” Swift said. “We reached out to them, called every one of them to make sure they were OK with it, they wanted it, they needed it.”
On Tuesday evening, with the help of Akian, the Whooley Foundation delivered 43 meals, and Wednesday morning the delivered another 42.
When they first came up with the idea for providing Thanksgiving meals, the Akian brothers were not sure how to get the meals. One day Steve was in Market Basket and discovered they have packaged full meals with cooked turkey, mashed potatoes, butternut squash, holiday stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce.
“All they’ve got to do is open up the box, put it in the over, heat it up,” Steve said. “It’s a full meal. It feeds 8-10 people.”
Swift said the Thanksgiving meal effort has been rewarding.
“It’s a challenge, but it makes you feel good helping everybody out. People who need it, especially at Thanksgiving,” Swift said.