SPOKANE, Wash. — Lucky people in Spokane received free energy-saving kits Thursday.
With the help of McKinstry and Avista, SNAP was able to hand out 600 kits that will help keep your home warm and even keep energy bills low.
Inside the energy-savings kids are LED lightbulbs, window insulation kits and other things to help keep your house warm.
“It provides some of these simple tools that people can actually use for themselves to make their homes more comfortable and reduce their energy bill,” said Michelle Howard.
Shelly Russel, who was helping hand out these kits, said it is much more than that.
“Anytime that we can give back to our community is super important,” Russel said. “Our community is super important and I know firsthand that these kits go to families that really need them.”
Sarah Hofstee works for McKinstry and helped put together and hand out the kids. She said within the first two hours, SNAP handed out over half of its kits.
“I had a line waiting for me while I was setting up at about 8:15 this morning, which was beautiful,” Hofstee said.
The kit distribution was part of SNAP and McKinstry’s many community outreach programs.
“We have over 40 programs, many of them are income-qualified, so they’re free,” Howard said.
“We decided to have the community come to us so that we can engage, we can see these people, we can talk to them, we can tell them that McKinstry is here to help and that we offer a ton of building good things throughout the entire year,” Hofstee said.
Hofstee said this is the first year they have had the community come to them rather than dropping kits off on people’s doorsteps. She said getting to interact with the community was one of the best parts of the whole process.
“A couple of us shed tears, which was really sweet,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of ‘I love you McKinstry, I love you SNAP, thank you so much for doing this.'”
If you didn’t make it to Thursday’s event, SNAP said you can come by any one of its offices and pick up a kit yourself.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY KXLY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
