The gifts that always give back
Our Warm Their Souls program delivers hope around the holidays.
Changing lives, warming souls
The culture at Academy Mortgage can best be described by our actions instead of words. Few of our actions capture this spirit more than Warm Their Souls.
A few years back, one of our people found a family in need during the holiday season. A small team came together to help — using their own time and money — to bring some much-needed warmth at a very welcomed time.
Hope grows through inspiration
Warm Their Souls spread across our locations all around the country. Teams were formed. “Angels” were nominated (Angels guide each branch to find a family in need, and to make it happen). No one is even sure where the name “Warm Their Souls” came from, and no one asked. We were too busy helping families.
"We found a mom in Utah who was sleeping on the couch. When we brought her a new bed, the woman just cried into the arms of one of the Academy employees. She was so tired and in physical pain from sleeping on the couch." Add name
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In just a few years, the Warm Their Souls program has grown to be a powerful source of hope for many families in the communities we serve. As the stories started to spread “around the water cooler,” more and more locations were getting involved.
Warm Their Souls was always more than a toy drive
Our people worked together to find people in need, either from referrals or shared public services (such as homeless shelters, refugee resettlement, IRC, and low-income schools). And when a family is identified as being in need, the team would meet with them to hear their story and learn just how we could help.
Some stories can be hard to hear.
“We met a single mom with a special needs child. She was from an African country, where she had escaped from terrible events. All of her family was killed. She was 16 at the time, and became pregnant from being raped. She fled to Egypt as a refugee before coming to the U.S. She was getting so much hope being helped by Academy, who was bringing in food and things that would help ease some of the burden in her life.”
We hear their stories, then get to work
Making the list, doing a team-shopping trip, holding a gift-wrapping party after hours…and finally, delivering the gifts.
It’s been nothing shy of amazing to watch our teams create a program like Warm Their Souls. While the Home Office recently got involved, our only objective was to help share the stories — to inspire hope wherever we can.
You can see (and share) some of the most recent stories at warm-their-souls.com.