Thank you, Laboratory employees!

For Laboratory employees, the season of giving is in full swing. More than $2.2 million was donated to area nonprofits in the recent Employee Giving Campaign, our holiday food drive produced Thanksgiving meals for hundreds of local families, and our ongoing gift drive will surely result in smiles on Christmas morning.

Here in the Community Partnerships Office, we are grateful to all the employees who have supported our recent giving initiatives. You have truly made the holidays a little brighter for many families in Northern New Mexico.

We’d also like to recognize those employees who give not just seasonally but year-round. Two such individuals come to mind: Kacy Hopwood of Santa Fe and Stanley Trujillo of Coyote.

Kacy Hopwood is a professional staff assistant at the Center for Nonlinear Studies who volunteers to teach her daughter to have a giving heart. “I take every opportunity that I can to teach my daughter that our family is fortunate to have food on our table and all of our basic needs covered,” she says. “I feel very privileged to have a job that allows me the time and actually encourages me to organize giving within my group and division.” Many thanks to Kacy for creating a culture of giving at her office and imparting to postdocs and students the importance of giving back to our community. 

Stanley Trujillo, of Quality and Performance Assurance, is another standout employee who participates in every giving drive throughout the year. In 2005, Stanley was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which left him temporarily paralyzed. When he came back to work—using a walker—a year later, his takeaway was that the world is full of good people. “A lot of people helped me,” he says. “I can’t pay it all back, so I choose to pay it forward.”

Stanley notes that the Laboratory’s giving drives don’t show up on employees’ performance reviews. “It’s hard to get people to volunteer; people are busy with their full-time jobs,” he says. “Doing anything extra is really that—extra. But the employees of this Laboratory are so generous, giving to total strangers by placing their confidence in the Community Partnerships Office to make sure that people who need assistance in Northern New Mexico receive it.”

And here at the Community Partnerships Office, it’s truly our honor and privilege to do just that. Because, as Stanley says, “it’s better to be on the giving end than the receiving end.”

Happy holidays.

—Kathy Keith
Director, Community Partnerships Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Laboratory employees and sisters Kacy Hopwood and Nicole Voight shop for the 2015 LANL food drive.