Celebrating Community, Giving Back

For many, the holiday season is a time of gifts, good food, and family. But for others, the holiday season is a time of giving. This past December, Northern Edge Casino employees doubled up on donations through their annual Toys for Tots drive and Angel Tree. You're watching the Local News Network brought to you by Traegers Bar and Ace Hardware of Farmington. I'm Connor Shrieve.

So this year, we really wanted to do something other than Toys for Tots. So the management team agreed on the Angel Tree Organization since that directly affects our community that we live in. And so we got in touch with Ms. Jennifer there at the organization and she was able to provide us with the little tickets. So we had a large number of our management teams that was interested in participating. We handed out all of the little tickets that were created to all of them, and then they went out and got a bunch of stuff. Everybody did really well.

You might have seen the Angel Tree pop-up at local retail stores, usually in the form of a traditional pine Christmas tree. Ornaments come in the form of little angels with a list of items, often ranging from clothes to toys from local families in the community participating in the program.

So it's very customizable on there for every single child that is in that program. So we were able to get very specific things for each child. Even some of their hobbies or interests were on there, like mine had girly things and DIY projects that they were very interested in. So that kind of helped a lot to get gifts.

The Angel Tree is just the tip of the iceberg of the programs Northern Edge Casino operates. In addition to the yearly Toys for Tots drive, there's the annual food drop off with Northern Edge and its sister, Flowing Water Casino, with their affiliated Navajo Chapters.

We have our Window Rock Fair, or Navajo Nation Fair, and there they have the 4-H livestock. We purchase a lot of that livestock. All of that gets sent to San Juan Meat and they essentially are able to cut it up for us and we're able to distribute that to our host chapters as well. We wait till towards Christmas or Thanksgiving usually to start distributing those to the chapter houses and they'll publicize it and everybody within the community will come out and pick up items until they run out.

Northern Edge Casino is celebrating 12 years in 2024, so keep an eye out for upcoming events, celebrating the anniversary this year. Find more information about this and other stories at farmingtonlocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network, I'm Connor Shreve.