HARRINGTON, Del. – The spirit of giving was omnipresent at Harrington Raceway and Casino on November 13 as more than a dozen jumbo palette boxes of items were donated as part of a joint donation drive to benefit Toys for Tots and United Service Organizations (USO) Delaware.

Held in the casino’s gold room from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., donations were accepted that included games/puzzles, action figures, dolls, and miscellaneous toys for Toys for Tots, while USO items included food items such as fruit snacks, Slim Jims, crackers, paper plates, paper towels and more. More than 1,500 items were donated from approximately 1,300 participants. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., was also a pivotal contributor, supplying a tractor trailer and driver to transport the items.

Bruce Kmiec, Center Director for USO Delaware, was on hand for the event and was extremely pleased with the turnout.

“This event was one of the best supply drives seen to date for the USO DE team,” said Kmiec.  “We cannot express enough thanks to Harrington Raceway and Casino for allowing our long lasting community relationship to build to this level of greatness. It takes partners such as HRC to help our USO Delaware team take such great care of our men and women in uniform here in Delaware.”

Harrington Raceway and Casino CEO/President Patricia Key was happy to build on the community partnership.

 “We appreciate the opportunity to help two great organizations,” she said. “We continue to attempt to partner with the community when possible and once again our customers demonstrated an overwhelming outpouring of support with a generous amount of donated items.”

Harrington Raceway and Casino has been active with various community partners in recent years, hosting similar donation drives for other non-profit organizations such as Ronald McDonald House, Food Bank of Delaware and Kent County SPCA among others.

The USO, a nonprofit organization, has provided help to over 10 million military service members and their families. For more information, please visit www.uso.org.

Toys for Tots is a non-profit effort coordinated by the United States Marine Corps Reserve which distributes toys to children whose parents cannot afford to buy them gifts for Christmas. For more information, please visit www.toysfortots.org.