When the city of Denver instituted a shelter-in-place order, the non-profit A Precious Child (APC), based in Broomfield, CO, suddenly saw both a dramatic decrease in donations and an increase in people in need. With COVID-19, APC found that many children and families were still in dire need of donations of cleaning supplies, hygiene products, and more, but it was much harder for APC to collect and distribute these goods. The Alto team in Denver started a food and clothing drive to help support APC's efforts and is offering free delivery of donations to people in need.

Matt Alley, Sr. Manager of Operations at Alto Pharmacy in Denver, had previously been a volunteer at A Precious Child and received a message from APC as they were looking for organizations to help support their efforts. We caught up with Matt to hear more about Alto's commitment to the Denver community.

Q: Can you share how the Denver Alto team got involved in efforts to support A Precious Child?

When the shelter in place started in Denver, I had a few non-profits reach out to me as many of them were really impacted by this and looking for ways to ensure they could help people in need. I had volunteered with A Precious Child before and believe they are doing great work to support children in the area.  

I immediately wanted to find a way that I could support them, but also knew that many of my Alto coworkers had been talking about how they could help give back to the community during this time. We spoke with A Precious Child to hear what they needed help with and our team decided to hold a food and clothing drive to help collect donations for A Precious Child.

We all focused on reaching out to our own networks to ask for donations that we collected at the Alto office and then delivered to A Precious Child for them to distribute to families in need.

At our core we are a community pharmacy. This is just what we do. That’s why this is so important to me.

Q: How do you anticipate this partnership with A Precious Child may adapt as Denver ends its shelter in place?

The shelter in place order definitely had an immediate impact on A Precious Child’s donations since more people were staying home. They normally have individuals drop off donations in person, but that doesn’t work during shelter in place, so they were exploring ways to aggregate collections and have them delivered in bulk. A Precious Child created a wish list of things that they needed to get to families such as hygiene, cleaning and baby essentials. Our team worked to get these goods and then our Alto delivery couriers helped drop these off in a safe way to the donation center.

Looking forward, we have identified that the way we can best help out A Precious Child is to have Alto couriers provide safe, no contact delivery of donations to families in need. Since Alto has continued to serve the community and help get deliveries of medications to people, even during shelter in place, we already have great processes in place to keep both the delivery courier and the person receiving a delivery of medications or donations safe.  

We are going to be partnering with A Precious Child in an ongoing capacity to offer free delivery service of donations to families in need across eight counties in the Denver area each Friday. 

I am grateful that the Alto leadership has been so supportive of our team’s efforts to give back to the community. We are in such a crazy new reality with COVID-19, and it feels really good to be able to contribute and give back. I know it’s been motivating for everyone here on the Denver Alto team to be able to give back to the community both through our own work at Alto and through this partnership.

Now, more than ever, I think Alto’s services and free doorstep delivery of medications will help keep the community healthy and safe.