Highlands Rotary Club donates 150 pizzas, money to Allegheny Valley Hospital
It was pizza Thursday for 150 of the staff at Allegheny Valley Hospital in Harrison.
The diminutive Highlands Area Rotary Club, with just 13 members, showed their hearts are bigger than their numbers by donating the individual-sized pizzas, along with a $500 check to help outfit the hospital’s “serenity room,” where staff can get a respite from the covid-19 pandemic.
“We thought about what we wanted to do in the community,” said John Peters, a past-president and board member of the club and a funeral home owner. “We gave to the food banks and to the hospital and to the first responders. We’ve given $3,400 away to all those organizations.
“We want to do something for our community,” he said. “That’s why we raise the money that we do to donate to the organizations that need it.”
The 150 four-cut pizzas, from Fox’s Pizza Den in Tarentum, arrived around 11:30 a.m. Peters said they gave the individual pizzas instead of larger ones so that each could be given to and handled by one person.
The pizzas cost about $600, Peters said.
Dr. Vicenta Gaspar-Yoo, the hospital’s president, was among those who came out to thank the Rotary club members and help get them into the hospital and distributed.
“I wanted to thank them for uplifting the staff for lunch today,” Gaspar-Yoo said.
The serenity room, called “Tranquility Bay” at the hospital, is a place where nurses and other staff can de-stress and relax, Gaspar-Yoo said. The club’s donation will help, she said.
“Our nurses and our staff have been working full-time, long hours together with the fear and anxiety of being exposed to the covid-19 patients,” she said.
“They’ve been holding up pretty well,” she said of her staff. “Some of them have been working from home. We have been trying really hard to make sure that the staff morale is up.”
The serenity room started as a project of the nurses in the nurse residency program, said Stephanie Waite, a spokeswoman for Allegheny Health Network. It was accelerated because of the need posed by the covid-19 response.
The room includes comfortable seating, relaxation video with music, a Himalayan salt lamp, affirmations and stress release activities such as coloring pages and kinetic sand.
Amenities include aromatherapy face masks, individual hand lotion packs, stress balls and hot/cold packs. A variety of snacks, water, coffee and tea are available.
A total of eight donors consisting of churches, businesses and individuals have contributed to the room, Waite said.
“AVH benefited from a generous community and received as gifts for this room the salt lamp, a microwave and a Keurig for coffee, a Keurig for tea and two sets of flameless candles,” Waite said. “Donors… provided a myriad of snacks, everything from granola bars to chips.”
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a TribLive reporter covering news in New Kensington, Arnold and Plum. A Pittsburgh native and graduate of Penn State University's Schreyer Honors College, Brian has been with the Trib since December 2000. He can be reached at brittmeyer@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.